


It Casts a Lovely Light

by Azzandra



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Flashbacks, Nick and Sole Survivor knew each other, Slow Burn, kind of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2018-06-21
Packaged: 2018-11-30 11:15:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 24,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11462445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/pseuds/Azzandra
Summary: Nick Valentine not only knew who Poppy Whittaker was, but tried for years to bring her and her husband to justice. They always managed to elude him, even to the very end.Now, a couple of centuries down the line, Nick comes face to face with Poppy again. And by some twist of fate, he's the one she asks to help find her son.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this for the kink meme last year, but then the kink meme kinda fizzled out. However, I still like this fic, so I'm going to start editing an posting it here, so it doesn't get lost in the bowels of the internet forever.

_Poppy Whittaker._

_She adjusted her hat just so, and then leaned closer to the two-way glass and ran a finger along the edge of her mouth, straightening the outline of her lipstick with a fingernail. Then, perhaps guessing at her current audience, she winked at the glass._

_Nick, standing precisely on the other side of it, felt a swell of disapproval at the woman's antics._

_"Cut her loose," Captain Widmark said sternly._

_"Sir," Nick started._

_"_ Now _, Detective. Don't let me see you bring her or her husband in again, not for so much as a parking ticket. I got a call from the mayor this morning. The_ mayor _, for Chrissakes." Captain Widmark ran a hand through his hair, and Nick could tell the man was at the end of his patience. "Apparently Mrs. Whittaker's in the same bridge club as the mayor's wife. We don't need this headache when we already have bigger fish to fry."_

_On the other side of the glass, Poppy Whittaker picked up her white gloves from the interrogation table, and checked her wristwatch. She did not sit back down on the chair, but stood as if waiting to leave at any moment._

_Not that she was wrong about that part. The evidence against the Whittakers was not as ironclad as Nick initially hoped. That was the problem, Nick realized about two months into this case. He had to catch both of them at once, or he would get neither at all. Spouses couldn't testify against each other, but they sure as hell were quick with providing alibis. And the Whittakers were careful; cautious in the risks they took, clever in the friends they cultivated._  
  
_Captain Widmark was not wrong either. Operation Winter's End was entering its critical stages. Running foul of the mayor could put the whole thing in jeopardy._  
_But afterwards--_  
  
_"I can get the evidence I need," Nick muttered, almost to himself._  
  
_"But not today," Captain Widmark said._  
  
_"No. Not today." Nick shook her head. "I'll show her out. Gonna be the last time she leaves here a free woman, though, if I have any say in it."_  
  
_Captain Widmark gave Nick a pat on the shoulder before turning and leaving._  
  
_When Nick opened the door to the interrogation room, Poppy Whittaker turned her guileless black eyes and her luminous smile on him, and Nick could almost understand how everyone kept letting her get away with it._  
  
_He hardly got to tell her she was free to go before she was walking to the door anyway, frustratingly confident. But before exiting the room, she stopped in front of him._  
  
_"Please don't be glum, Detective Valentine," she told him, sounding genuinely concerned for his state of mind. She adjusted his tie and patted down his lapels like a fussy sister. Then she looked at him from under her eyelashes before she continued, "If you want to see me and Nate in handcuffs so badly, I'm sure we could set up a dinner date sometime."_  
  
_Nick's jaw clenched._  
  
_"Careful what you wish for, Doll," he replied, an edge of threat to his voice. "Might just come true one of these days."  
_  
_Poppy tsked, and with a shake of her head, pulled her gloves on._

_"So predictable, Detective. I'm almost disappointed." A smirk ghosted across her face. "Almost."_

* * *

 

 

  
And that was it. That was the last time Nick Valentine, original article, had seen Poppy Whittaker. Which brought them here, not really full circle--not really any shape that made sense at all--but meeting again and for the first time in Vault 114.  
  
In the concrete silence of the room, the click of Nick's lighter was deafening; the drag he took of his cigarette was reproving. And Poppy Whittaker's lipstick was still bright red.  
Her luminous smile had gotten a bit strained around the edges, though her dark eyes were the same. Guileless.  
  
But why was she here?

"Why, I'm here for _you_ , Detective," she answered.

"Not that I don't admire your dedication, Doll, but if you're burgling a Vault, I'm sure there's more valuable loot you could be carrying off than some beat-up old synth."

"If I were on the market for gratitude, I'd certainly be looking for it elsewhere," she said, her smile remaining even, "but right now I need a sleuth. And you, Detective, look like you need an exit strategy."

Nick pondered the situation for a few moments. It was wasting valuable time they could spend escaping, but it was a situation that justified a little pondering. He was thrown for a loop, unsure what the game here was.

She didn't look nearly as surprised as she should have been when she stepped into the room, and she slipped a bit too easily into her old routine for his identity to have been a complete surprise to her. She came here for _Nick Valentine_ , even if she had not been anticipating the particular form he'd take.

He'd never known Poppy Whittaker to ever need anything from the old Nick. Maybe this was the opening he'd never had, about two hundred years too late to book her on anything. Just his luck.  
"Alright," he said. "Lead the way."

And she did.

 

* * *

 

 

  
Here was something easy to forget about Poppy Whittaker: she and her husband started as lowlife thugs. In the early days of his investigation into the Whittakers, Nick found out from an old retired beat cop that, as teenagers in the racketeering business, they'd been partial to bats (Nate Whittaker, a looming monster of a man even at 17) and crowbars (Poppy Sterling, shorter and more nimble, but with just as mean a swing).  
  
Troubled youth, some would have called them. Maybe no more than that, once they reached legal age and their juvenile records were sealed.  
  
Nate had signed up with the army, and Poppy had gone to law school, and at some point they'd gotten married, but all that respectability they managed to scrape together between the two of them only went into finding new ways of screwing good folks over. They used backroom deals, and fraud, and insiders, instead of bats and crowbars, but in the end, it all amounted to the same. A handshake here, a donation to the right campaign there, a bit of shuffling some legal documents around, and here were Nate and Poppy Whittaker, criminals in nice suits, but still criminals.  
  
Now Poppy was tearing through Skinny Malone's men with a shotgun, but when she reared on the last triggerman as he was reloading his submachine gun, and she cracked him in the face with her gun so hard that his neck snapped, Nick could see a little of the woman who'd spent her teenage years menacing store owners on behalf of 'Fingers' O'Malley's protection racket. This was not the sharply-dressed woman with the impeccable make-up who would tease and taunt him on her way out of the police station. This was who had always been hiding underneath. He wondered if that husband of hers would come lumbering along at any moment, clad in leathers and ragged jeans and with pieces of armors strapped to his limbs, a match to Poppy as he swung his bat.

But then, when they were nearly out, and Skinny Malone and Darla were standing between them and the exit, it was neither a shotgun nor a crowbar that Poppy employed. It was the face which had once made the upper crust of Boston crumble before her, that made even hardened police officers soften; her dark eyes pleading and sincere, and that certain tone of voice, husky with feeling.

It was the other Poppy who did the talking, and though she had no high heels, and her eyebrows were not as fastidiously plucked, she had her red lipstick and her silver tongue.  
"Darla, listen to me. You have a home to go back to. You don't want to throw your life away with these thugs."

There was that undertone of genuine concern that Poppy had always mastered. Nick had a sense, as he witnessed this scene, that this exact line had once been said to Poppy. It hadn't  _worked_ on Poppy, obviously, given the trajectory of her life, and Darla with her baseball bat seemed, at first, to be cut from a similar cloth.

But maybe Poppy was more persuasive than she was tractable, because Darla's eyes widened with realization. Skinny Malone wasn't as attractive in the harsh glare of reality as he had been when playing at sophisticated crime boss in these concrete tombs. And Darla, with her sparkly dress and her smoky eye, had been angling to be something like a first lady of crime, not yet another Wasteland thug's girlfriend.  
  
Maybe, Nick considered, the reason that line hadn't worked on Poppy was because she'd always been aware her Nate was a thug, and had never had illusions about herself as being something different.  
  
The point of it was that, in the end, Darla had scurried back to Diamond City, and Skinny Malone lost all his fight and let them go, so long as they legged it right out of there.  
It was night by the time they reached the outside, a fat moon hanging in the sky, green-tinged and glowing. Nick inhaled, or the nearest thing to it, and the cool air he sucked in cooled the interior of his chassis. When he exhaled, the irritating concrete dust he'd been accumulating during his weeks in the Vault went out as well.  
  
"This as strange for you as it is for me?" he asked.  
  
Poppy smiled. In the darkness, the glow of her Pip-boy casting sharp green angles over her features.

"Might be a bit stranger for you than for me, Detective," she said, all smooth cadence and sympathy. "I can surmise some facts about you just by looking. But for all you know, _I_ might as well be a ghost."

Nick hummed and chewed on his cigarette as he regarded her.  
  
"Those new gen 3 models," he said, "are awfully indistinguishable from human when they need to be. And putting a bunch of memories into one of those might be more useful than uploading them in a hunk of junk like me. Though why they'd bother loading up a synth with a pre-War criminal's memory is even more of a mystery than why they'd use a pre-War cop's."  
  
He was interrupted by Poppy's laughter--not mocking, but low and amused. That was Poppy's only tell that he had ever been able to figure out. It had always been what tipped off old Nick that he was too far off base.  
  
"When this is all the information you have, that is the conclusion you can draw," Poppy replied. "But you don't have the pertinent facts."  
  
"And what might those be?" Nick asked.  
  
"That my husband and I were signed on to a Vault," she said. "That the Vault was close enough to our home that we made it when the bombs fell. That the Vault might have been set up, unbeknown to the participant, to experiment with cryo-stasis, and that we all climbed into what we were told were decontamination pods only to get a very rude awakening a couple hundred years down the line."

Nick's eyes slid to the Pip-boy on Poppy's wrist. _Trust but verify_ , was the old saying, and for now he was going to trust.

"Which Vault was that?"  
  
"111," she answered. "Just near Sanctuary Hills."  
  
And he would verify, though by her expression, she probably knew that.  
  
"Rude awakening's probably an understatement," Nick said. And he would know. He still remembered the choking sense of confusion in his first few weeks. "So you woke up to a world gone mad and decided it was the best time to look up your old pal Valentine? Sorry to disappoint you, Doll. You got me instead."  
  
Poppy gave him a thin smile, one he hadn't actually seen from her before. Not a happy expression, and Poppy always made sure to look as little put-upon as possible around him, back in the day.  
  
"My son was kidnapped," Poppy answered. "Shaun. He's not even a year old."  
  
Had she said anything else, given any other reason, Nick would not have believed her so readily. But lying about something like this would have been a bridge too far even for Poppy Whittaker, and it showed him the first crack in her facade that he'd ever been witness to.  
  
"I'm sorry," he said quietly. He wasn't entirely sure what to say next, but discarded a few remarks for being too heartless under the circumstances. "If you need help finding him, I'll do everything I can."  
  
Poppy nodded in thanks, and the moment was... awkward, before it passed.  
  
Nick cleared his throat, changed the subject.  
  
"How did you find me, anyway? Not a lot of people knew where I was."

Poppy's old face slid back on seamlessly, and she answered with her usual smile that it had been Ellie who told her.


	2. Chapter 2

 

It was not an question of whether or not he would help her, because losing a child, and an infant one at that, was something even people like the Whittakers didn't deserve. Nick would help.

But that didn't mean Nick had to trust Poppy, or believe that she had changed, because he didn't honestly think her capable of it. Didn't think Nate Whittaker was any more capable of it either, though he'd always been one to dance to his wife's tune, so maybe it wasn't completely up to him.

No, what troubled Nick was that the Commonwealth was uniquely the kind of place that could appeal to people like the Whittakers' worst impulses. The Whittakers had spent years engaging in criminal enterprises while obfuscating the police. In the Commonwealth, there was not even that much to keep them in check.

When he returned to his office, Ellie was beside herself. She was halfway to scolding him for his recklessness when she stopped to ask how he'd gotten out, and he had to tell her about Poppy.

Ellie was surprised and touched at Poppy's magnanimity, and Nick felt the psychosomatic pang of nausea as he remembered when old Nick went to pick up Jenny from shopping one day. She'd been talking about the new friend she'd made in the department store, a lovely, engaging young woman with similar tastes in movies, and Nick had initially been glad to hear it. Moving from Chicago meant leaving her old friends and coworkers behind. A new friend in Boston would do her good.

Then Jenny waved at her new friend as they passed her car, and the moment the friend took off her sunglasses and waved back, Nick felt like someone had upended a tray of ice cubes down his shirt. Jenny's new friend was Poppy Whittaker, and she made a good show of pretending to be just as shocked by Nick's appearance as he was by hers.

It had not been a good day for Nick, when he'd had to inform Jenny that he was actually in the middle of investigating his new friend, and that that was likely the reason Poppy had approached her. Jenny, for her part, had been convinced the entire thing was a massive coincidence, that Poppy Whittaker was merely a very charming, friendly woman who couldn't possibly have any malicious intentions, and the more he insisted otherwise, the more paranoid he sounded even to his own ears.

Poppy had played it very apologetic, of course; she claimed ignorance and promised never to approach Jenny again, and as far as Nick knew, she'd kept that promise religiously, which hadn't helped his case with Jenny. Nick was not entirely sure if Poppy had been at all torn up over how he'd nipped her attempts at friendship with Jenny in the bud. She had to know it would only be a matter of time, and the entire incident had driven a rare wedge between him and Jenny. Maybe stirring the pot on his relationship had been all she had intended from the start. It was hard to tell.

And now Ellie probably thought Poppy was simply a helpful soul, out to make the Commonwealth a better place one improbable rescue at a time.  Not that he would have minded if she were, but if Poppy's intentions turned out to be less than honorable in the long run, having her play the saint again would prove problematic.

Still, Nick had learned his lesson, and he didn't say anything this time around.

They'd come to Diamond City their separate ways. Nick had offered otherwise, would have liked to learn a thing or two about Poppy before he got her in the office to unload, but Poppy had bowed out citing an errand she had to run beforehand.

Nick had to wonder what errand was more important than tracking down her son, but he had to cut off a few ungenerous trains of thought when it occurred to him she might just not have been comfortable traveling with the copper who used to have it in for her.

This was going to be a strange experience all around, he suspected.

Poppy arrived at the agency in short order, and Ellie managed to intercept her first, with thanks and the petty cash as repayment. Poppy accepted both with grace, and then took Ellie's hand to give it a friendly squeeze. She smiled her smile, and Ellie must have been appropriately dazzled, because then Poppy's attention shifted to Nick.

Nick cleared his throat and gestured to the chair before his desk.

"Why don't you have a seat?" he suggested, as he took his own.

Poppy sat down, hands folded in her lap. Nick got a better look at her in the yellow-tinged lights of the agency as she did; Poppy really was the kind of woman who looked better in natural sunlight than under fluorescent lighting, and that was evident even now, when she looked a great deal rougher than in any of Nick's memories.

Her hair was a simple shoulder-length bob, instead of the elaborate coif she used to favor, but her fringe was still cut with sharp precision. She was dressed in leathers, with bits of mismatched armor, and when she sat down, she took her shotgun off its sling over her shoulder and placed it on the floor next to her chair, the muzzle aimed carefully away from anyone. But she still lacked some unnameable quality that growing up in the Wasteland tended to foster. She looked rougher, but still far from _rough_ , as little sense as that made.

Nick was willing to admit to himself that maybe he'd been out of line assuming she'd had an easier time adapting to the Commonwealth than he did. He found, in short order, that Nate Whittaker was dead, and that Poppy's wake up to the new world had been the gunshot through her husband's brain and the cries of her infant son as he was taken from her. So yes, Nick felt like a cad for his assumptions.

Felt more like one to see Poppy's composure waver the way it did. The woman had been nothing but put-together and calculated in her reactions in the time the old Nick had known her. Even the times she seemed upset or distressed or outraged, Nick had always suspected those were performances meant to have a certain effect.

Not this, though. Whatever the old Nick had thought of the woman back then, in the here and now, Nick had no doubt she was telling him about possibly the worst experience of her life, and the brittle vulnerability in the voice was not pretense.

He found himself sorry to realize that a piece of work like Kellogg had been responsible for it.

Nick mused to himself, not without some measure of bitterness, that when it came to crime, there was always a bigger fish.

 

* * *

 

  
_"Mrs. Whittaker? I have some questions for you."_

_Poppy Whittaker took off her sunglasses, and that was the first time she and Nick Valentine laid eyes on each other properly. She was wearing a black and white polka-dot dress. He had been leaning against her car waiting for her, and he put out his cigarette, throwing it into a nearby drain as he saw her approach._

_He could tell by the way she was sizing him up that she knew he was a cop, even before he took out his badge and presented it to her. Still, she inspected his credentials very carefully._

_"Detective Valentine, is it?" she said. "Oh dear, I am afraid I must disappoint you. I don't really know much that would interest a police officer."_

_He smiled at her, and retrieved a notebook from his inside pocket._

___"That's alright, ma'am, just answer to the best of your knowledge." He flipped a few pages. "Do you and your husband happen to know a gentleman by the name of Bruce Grabowski?"_

___Poppy tilted her head thoughtfully, and then smiled brightly._

___"Oh, is he that mechanic Nate uses? I did ask him to get the name, after he practically brought Daisy here back to life." Poppy gestured to the cherry-red car behind Nick._

___"No," Nick replied, "not a mechanic. Not much of anything these days, since his knee got smashed in."_   


_Poppy's eyes widened, and her hand flew up to her mouth._

_"Gracious," she whispered, shocked. "Is he alright?"_

___"He'll live," Nick said flatly, but Poppy shook her head._

_"Terrible!" she said. "I'll have flowers sent to the hospital. Everybody could do with flowers at such sad times."_

_Nick made a non-committal sound. He doubted any flowers would get to Bruce, even if she tried to send them. He'd been registered under a fake name, and a plainclothes police officer was stationed at his door at every minute of the day. But Nick didn't mention any of that._

_"What happened to the poor man?" Poppy asked, turning doe-eyed with sympathy._

_"Good question, ma'am. Maybe you can help us get to the bottom of it. Are you aware Mr. Grabowski is a tenant in one of the buildings you and your husband own?"_

___Poppy raised an eyebrow at first, regarding Nick quietly and very seriously._

___"Detective Valentine..." Her voice was all silk and honey as she reached over and took his left hand. She grasped his fingers gently, turned it over to inspect it._

___Nick had no idea what was happening, but he remained quiet and waited._

___"Not married?" she asked, and he realized she'd been looking for a wedding band, or maybe the tan line where a ring might go._

___He pulled his hand back and cleared his throat._

___"Not yet," he replied. "But if we could get back to the subject at hand. Mr. Grabowski. Did you or your husband know him?"_

_"Your questions! Of course." Poppy folded her sunglasses, hooked them on her dress collar, and began rooting through her purse. She smiled at Nick, as if pleading patience from him, but she was also showing a bit more of her canines than seemed strictly necessary._

_She finally found what she was searching for, and took out a card, handing it to Nick. The card had a name and the words Attorney at Law emblazoned in fine black letters._

___"Mr. Richardson will be most helpful, I am sure," Poppy told him. "Please do call him with all your questions. My husband and I keep him in the closest confidence."_

_She ran her fingers over the back of Nick's hand a final time, the touch just a bit too intimate for strangers. Then she sidestepped him, and went to the car._

_Nick stuffed the card in-between the pages of his notebook. It didn't mean much that Poppy Whittaker was lawyering up. In his years on the force, Nick learned that calling a lawyer was not so much an indicator of guilt or innocence so much as an indicator of social status. Maybe she was just being smart about it. Mentioning Grabowski was meant to get a rise, to help him gauge her reaction. Nick's gut told him that she weaseled out of that question a bit too swiftly, but if he was wrong, he hoped he hadn't needlessly alarmed an innocent woman._

_The next day, Nick received a call from a hysterical Bruce Grabowski over a bouquet of flowers sent to him at the hospital. Nobody was supposed to know the room he was in, and the officer posted at his door had no clue who had brought the flowers in._

_It was an incident which would set the tone for all of Nick's future interactions with the Whittakers._

 

* * *

 

 

Poppy returned with the key to Kellogg's house.

"The mayor was very amiable," she said, and that was perhaps the first time Nick had ever heard that adjective used to describe Mayor McDonough.

Poppy's cocky smile melted away as the key slid into the lock, and if she held her breath as the door swung open, it was probably from more than just the dust.

They walked into the house, the sunlight at their back, and Poppy fumbled for a lightswitch.

It was not much to look at, all told. The parts that weren't empty space were utilitarian; a desk, a couch, a table. A bed up in the loft.

Poppy exhaled the breath she was holding, almost in disappointment. Loose sheets of paper were scattered on the floor, and she leaned down to pick one up. It was nothing. A ripped page from a technical manual, showing the blueprint for a gun mod. The kind of interesting tidbit a mercenary might find and stuff in his pocket while scavenging for more valuable loot. Poppy let go of the paper, and it fluttered to the ground.

"I'll take the loft," she said, and made a beeline for the stairs.

Nick heard her shuffling upstairs, almost immediately turning over Kellogg's meager possessions. He took stock of the room, and went first to the table, scanning its surface and dismissing its contents, and then moving towards the desk. There was a toolbox on top of the desk, and he opened this first before starting on the drawers.

"What if we don't find anything?" Poppy asked after a few moments.

Nick looked up from where he was peering into the toolbox. Poppy stood at the top of the stairs, looking down at him.

"We'll cross that bridge when we get to it," Nick said.

"It's a fair question. You can't exactly put out an APB on him," Poppy laughed, with a tinge of bitterness.

"There's--"

"--More than one way to skin a cat?" Poppy interjected.

"Not the words I was going to use, but it's a cliche for a reason," Nick replied. "Kellogg's bound to have contacts somewhere out there. Business associates. Enemies. Someone, somewhere, is going to know _something_. We'll run down all the leads until we find him. I'm willing to be at this for as long as it takes."

"Ah." Poppy tilted her head aside, and smiled sardonically--Nick wasn't sure she knew how to take kindness, though she could fake grace in accepting it fairly well. "I've always admired your doggedness, Detective. Glad to see it working to my advantage for once."

Poppy walked down the stairs, and Nick moved aside to let her look into the toolbox as well. Nothing much of interest there. Mostly tools. A few bottlecaps that Poppy picked out and distractedly stuffed into her pocket.

He cleared his throat.

"That's another thing we should talk about. You know I'm not him, right?" Nick said. "I'm not the Detective Valentine you used to know, just because I happen to have a few loose pieces of him rattling around in my head."

Poppy turned her head to Nick, looking surprised. Then she turned towards him completely and, grave-faced and thoughtful, looked him up and down. Sizing him up, like the first time she'd ever met Detective Valentine.

Whatever conclusion she'd drawn this time, there was a sudden spark of mischief in her eyes as she looked back up to his face, and she could suddenly barely restrain a grin.

A faint blare of alarm went off in the back of Nick's head, as she stepped closer to him. He took a step back, unwittingly. His left hand reached for the edge of the desk, and he pressed his knuckles down against the cool metal, pinning himself to the spot. He wouldn't back away just like that. He was not afraid of Poppy Whittaker, but he knew enough to be cautious.

"Well," she said, "that raises a conundrum for me, because I never got to share some of my thoughts pertaining to him."

"Thoughts?" Nick repeated.

He frowned, not entirely sure where this was going. Poppy had always acted more or less unflappable when it came to his investigation into her and her husband's criminal enterprises. He could only imagine the kinds of thoughts she hid under her pleasant veneer, but had never thought she would express them publicly. He couldn't help but be a little curious, a little eager to know that he'd managed to rattle her cage. That _the other Nick_ had managed it.

"Oh _yes_ ," she said, and this time when she took a step forward, Nick did not move back, no matter how much the look on her face made the soles of his feet itch. This seemed to please her. "Though, I suppose you could call them daydreams. Fantasies?"

She reached out, grasped his tie and ran her fingers down its length, pulling it taut until all its wrinkles were smoothed out.

If Nick still had the physical capability, his mouth would be going dry about that point, but he didn't, and he couldn't fully believe he wasn't misreading the situation.

Poppy looked at him from under her eyelashes.

"Like this one scenario where I find him working late at the station one night." She leaned closed, head tilted, eyes half-lidded. Her voice dropped to a purr as she continued, "And I show him how clever my mouth gets when I'm down on my knees."

Nick stiffened, as if lightning had shot down his spine. The strangely vulgar turn this conversation took was so at odds with the aloof sophisticate Nick remembered, that words failed him, utterly and completely.

Then she smirked at him, and began lowering herself to the ground, and whatever ill-defined mental image she'd put in his head suddenly set his skin alight, ghost sensations flooding and overclocking all of his sensors at once. He took a step back in earnest this time, all but jumped back like a startled deer, just as Poppy reached out and--

There was a click. The grind of a door sliding.

Poppy looked up at Nick with that smirk still on her face as her fingers depressed a bright red button under the desk.

"Look what I found," she said huskily.

It had been a ploy, and he only just now realized it. Poppy had wanted nothing more but to wind him up, and he'd let her.

"Good job," Nick replied, still a bit stunned, his voice more gravelly than usual. The fire across his skin ebbed, turned to cold bewilderment in his chest. Embarrassment. From the reaches of Nick's memory, a question surfaced like an echo. "Now how does such a nice girl know the inside of a criminal's head so well?"

Poppy turned amused.

"Funny, I knew this old detective who used to ask me the exact same thing," she replied.

She brushed past him, towards the newly unlocked door, but Nick grabbed her arm turned her back around to face him.

She looked up into his face expectantly.

"He wouldn't have thought much of your _daydreams_ , if you really want to know," he rumbled, half warning and half confession.

"Of course not," she agreed. "If I thought otherwise, I'd have tried it on him already."

Nick released Poppy's arm, surprised.

"And what about that husband of yours?"

"If Nate thought otherwise, he'd have tried it already, too."

More games. Nick shook his head. There would be no end to them, it seemed. Though this time, it didn't take him by surprise as much, didn't put any new images in his head. But it was a cruel joke to play on a man, taunting him with things that weren't possible for him. He'd not known Poppy was that particular brand of cruel; or at least never known it first hand.

Maybe in the Commonwealth, she didn't see the point of pretending as much. A layer had been peeled back, and even if Nick didn't appreciate the way Poppy acted, he could appreciate she was more honest about herself now than back when the other Nick had known her.


	3. Chapter 3

It came down to San Francisco Sunlights, in the end. Poppy twirled one of the cigars between her fingers. They stood by the railing next to Kellogg's house as they waited, looking out over Diamond City. Nick had not elaborated on who his specialist friend was, and Poppy had given him an odd look when he'd blown the high frequency signal, but she didn't ask any questions. She seemed content to wait and meet Nick's friend in due time.

Right at the moment, Poppy's gaze was fixed on a point in the distance, and Nick's eyes fell, against his better judgment, on Poppy.

"What are you going to do once we find Kellogg?" Nick asked, the question bubbling up from the tumult of his thoughts.  
"One good turn deserves another," she replied.

Then her eyes slid off the horizon and onto Nick. That gaze made his hackles rise, after how she'd conducted herself inside. She noticed.

"What is it that you think I'll do to him, Detective?" she asked with a softly bitter laugh.  
"I won't speculate," he said. "You've always been the creative sort."  
"Can't help that I've got an imagination."

"Could've helped to use it in better ways, though. You were a piece of work back in the day. You have to know that."

She inclined her head, as if this reference to her criminal past was no more than a bit of constructive criticism she was going to file away for later consideration.

"I wish I could say that getting Shaun back is all I want, and that I don't care what happens to Kellogg after that, but I can't help it, and you know this much about me. I _do_ care. I want Kellogg to pay for it to my satisfaction."

Nick hadn't expected anything different, really. With most other people, he'd foresee a clean death for Kellogg; not so much revenge, as the Justice of the Wasteland.

But Poppy had always been a woman who liked to find people's fault lines, and target them along their weak points. Whether that was in the course of her illicit business ventures, or payback against people who crossed her, Poppy was a woman who didn't kill anyone if she could help it. She much preferred they remained alive and suffer.

Nick had seen the way she struck below the belt with ease. There had to be a certain viciousness in the woman for her to do things like send hospital flowers to the guy she'd had crippled... or play her pranks on the synth who had no more than the memories of the cop who'd annoyed her once. And Kellogg might have been a piece of work, but Nick didn't much want to see what Poppy had in store for him. Or sometimes he did, depending on how generous his mood was towards child kidnappers.

Just then, Dogmeat came loping towards them, his ears pricked and his tongue lolling in his mouth, and Poppy seemed momentarily taken aback.

"Dogmeat's here," Nick said.

She reached out a hand for Dogmeat to sniff, before turning back to Nick with a question in her eyes.

"Dogmeat, huh?"

"Hell of an animal," Nick said, giving Dogmeat a lopsided smile and patting his head. "Doesn't really have an owner, but he's always ready to help out when he's needed."

Dogmeat made a pleased sound under Nick's hand, and then nuzzled at Poppy's hand as well. She scratched behind his ear; Dogmeat's tail thumped happily against the ground and his eyes screwed shut in pleasure.

And, well, this put to bed the notion that all dogs were good judges of character. Poppy, it seemed, could turn any species to putty in her hands.

"Robot sleuth and a dog sidekick. I think I used to watch this cartoon as a kid," Poppy remarked, disbelief still written clearly across her face.

"That's _synth detective_ ," Nick corrected, "and I prefer to think of Dogmeat as a consultant."

Poppy flashed him a grin, a careless, unguarded expression that Nick hadn't been expecting from her. Strangely, he found it more charming than any of her exaggerated overtures of friendship or her hamfisted games of seduction.

"Before you head out..." Nick started, and Poppy turned as she sensed his mood. "I know this is personal business. If you have to face Kellogg on your own, just say so."

She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again as she considered.

"I think," she said after a pause, looking surprised at her own admission, "that I would prefer you came with me."

Well, that surprised Nick as well, and they stared at each other for a long moment, both struck by the oddity of the situation.

"Sure, Doll," he said, and he had no idea why.

No, that wasn't true. He had _some_ idea. To wake up in a strange world so alien to one's own could make people cling to the strangest bits of the familiar. It could make some fool synth keep up a smoking habit, and an unrepentant criminal welcome along a poor facsimile of her once natural enemy. He understood better than most anyone else could.

It was still strange, though. 

Nick cleared his throat and gestured at Dogmeat.

"Go ahead. Let him sniff that cigar," Nick said. "See if he can find our man."

Poppy did so, leaning down and holding out the cigar for Dogmeat like she was expecting him to light it up and smoke it. She seemed unsure up until Dogmeat picked up the scent. With his nose along the ground, the dog began dancing in place excitedly.

"Well," Poppy remarked, "Looks like he's got it."

 

 

* * *

 

 

They followed Dogmeat through the blasted remains of Boston, skimming at the edge of mutant camps and entrenched raiders, coming out the other side of scattered firefights, and finally emerging onto the open road.

The first day out of Boston was clear, sunlit, and they stepped off cracked asphalt out onto a scraggly field to admire a passing radstag herd. Dogmeat's ears had twitched in interest, his nostrils flared, but Poppy placed a hand on the top of his head, and the dog remained in place.

"I hear radstag makes for good stew," Poppy remarked as she watched a majestic albino radstag lead the herd.

"They make for a merry chase first," Nick replied, "if you're lucky enough that they're not in the mood to stomp you to death instead."

Not that he didn't understand the appeal, but there was something a bit too sturdy about that albino radstag. Nick didn't quite like the look of its massive shoulders, or the suspicious rust-brown splotched on its legs. 

Poppy shrugged, and covered her disappointment by urging Dogmeat along. Later on, she took out a can of potato crisps from her pack, and ate them as she walked. Nick thought back and realized that that was her first and only meal for the day, and he wondered if he should have let her shoot a radstag doe earlier.

With impeccable timing, they were attacked by a pack of feral mutts, and the next few minutes were a frantic, bloody scrape as they fought their way through the entire pack. The dogs were upon them in numbers, before their ranks could be thinned with bullets, and he and Poppy ended up using their guns like blunt instruments against the grasping muzzles.

Nick's trenchcoat ended up worse for wear by the end of it, but he was mostly fine; one advantage to having no meat to sink teeth into. Poppy, on the other hand, ended up swaying on her feet, sweat-drenched and with her jacket sleeve torn and blood-stained. Even Dogmeat had his flank matted down and darkly slick, and Nick would have stopped them there for the night anyway, even if it wasn't at that moment darkening to twilight.

Nick built a fire and Poppy shrugged her jacket off, wincing as she peeled the sleeve off slowly. The injury looked worse under the torn material, but after Poppy splashed a bit of water over her arm, washing away the worst of the blood, it revealed two clean overlapping bites, her flesh punctured but not shredded. A quick stimpak to the arm took care of the issue.

She passed another stimpak to Nick, and before he could raise an eyebrow, she gestured to Dogmeat, who was licking his wounds on the other side of the fire. Most people wouldn't have wasted a stimpak on a dog, but then, most people didn't depend on a dog to get their infant son back. Whether out of generosity or pragmatism, Nick was happy for her choice, at least.

Nick moved towards Dogmeat slowly, telegraphing his motions, and Dogmeat must have had stimpaks before, because he didn't react with more than a small whine when Nick used it on him. Nick sat with Dogmeat and scratched his ears as the dog's wounds knit back together, and he knew Dogmeat was right as rain again when he sat up to lick Nick's face.

Poppy, meanwhile, had gotten up and walked just beyond the circle of the firelight. Nick couldn't see into the growing darkness, but he heard the squelch of meat and some eerily organic snapping noises, and his suspicions were proven right when Poppy returned with meat.

She threw Dogmeat a few choice scraps, and Dogmeat showed no compunction against cannibalism as he gobbled up the mongrel meat, and then Poppy took out a few skewers and packets of salt from her pack and began cooking the best cuts.

She didn't speak, didn't do more than throw Dogmeat the occasional piece of undercooked meat when his begging turned especially persistent, but there was nothing much to say at that moment, anyway. In the circle of light, tucked against the side of a hill, there was only the crackling of the fire, the sizzling of the meat, and the pinpoints of firelight reflected in Poppy's eyes as she watched the meat cook.

Dogmeat placed his head in Nick's lap, and eventually fell asleep with Nick's hand gently curled into his neck fur.

Something about the strange domesticity of the scene prodded at a stray bit of memory.

Nick found himself smiling.

"Robot sleuth with a dog sidekick," he muttered. "I think Nick used to watch that cartoon as a kid, too."

Poppy burst silent into laughter, no sound escaping her mouth, but her shoulders shaking. Her grin was wide and wolfish, and she looked like someone who'd been handed choice blackmail material just then. Though on second thought, Nick had had a very different mental image of what Poppy looked like when she got dirt on someone. This was a very human expression, by comparison.

"Asked his parents for a dog every time he'd see an episode," Nick added with a lopsided smile.

"Nate always wanted a dog too," Poppy added with an affectionate huff.

There was something stiff and guarded under her casual demeanor, though. Nick could see it, even if she thought the dark hid it.

"We got one after he was discharged," Poppy added. "Ran away, though. Well. _Maybe_ it ran away."

"Had your doubts?"

"Neighbor didn't like her much, and _I_ never liked the timing of that dent he got on his front bumper," Poppy said flatly. "I let it go, though. We let it go," she repeated with an undercurrent of resentment.

Nick felt a kind of chilling relief that she had. It took a particular kind of scum to run over a dog and hide it from the owners, but Poppy was a type of scum much higher on the food chain. It wouldn't have ended well for the man in question.

Poppy took one skewer off the fire, the meat sizzling, and she blew on it.

"I'm more of a cat person, myself," she continued. "Maybe after I get Shaun back we'll get a cat."

Nick took in the faraway look on Poppy's face, and he considered gently suggesting that the boy accompanying Kellogg had a slim chance of being the infant son she'd lost. He'd seen the way her eyes had lit up when Nick mentioned him back in the office, but it was a terrible hope to harbor, and likely to make the sting worse if things didn't go her way.

But Nick let it go as well. Terrible hope was still better than none, and Poppy seemed to have a knack with long shots. He would wait and see how she swung this one first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I have this fascination with the alternate scenarios that happen in-game if you choose some less obvious routes. For example, if you don't go to Sanctuary Hills after you first emerge from the vault, you never encounted Codsworth, but you do encounter Dogmeat for the first time at this point during the main quest, because Nick apparently uses a dogwhistle to summon Dogmeat and honest to god calls him a 'consultant' which is the most adorable thing. Given what Mama Murphy says at some point, apparently Dogmeat isn't anyone's dog, he just... knows a lot of people around the Commonwealth?? He just helps all these different people but doesn't have an owner?? He is the canine version of the Sole Survivor, basically.
> 
> Another interesting point of divergence: if you arrive in Goodneighbor before you get to Diamond City, and you use a memory pod at the Memory Den, you relive your last memory of your son, i.e. your spouse getting shot and Shaun getting kidnapped, which is understandably traumatic, but then you also get told to seek out Nick Valentine for help, which is a nice hook for the main quest. I'm mentioning this because that's basically the route I had in mind for Poppy. She didn't go to Sanctuary Hills, thus no Codsworth or Minutemen yet. So the order in which she meets people is shuffled around.
> 
> Also, there was an interesting point I addressed in the comments at some point, so I'll copy my comment here for whoever might find it interesting:
> 
> "It should be said, though, that the Whittakers weren't necessarily criminal 'bosses'. They had their own operations, but they were more like precision enterprises, meant to accomplish certain goals, rather than sprawling organizations. They didn't have a great deal of mooks or minions, though they probably did have 'associates'. And, of course, they started out as ground-level members of the Irish mob, and maintained ties with them as a result. (Especially because Poppy was a mob lawyer, pretty much all her clients were former, ahem, 'coworkers')
> 
> But, I should mention, since this won't come up until a lot later in the story, that by the time the Whittakers moved to Sanctuary Hills, they were pretty much retired. Nick probably didn't notice because the Eddie Winter investigation was consuming him by that point, but the Whittakers were pretty much trying to have a go at being respectable citizens. This was partially because they'd gotten a taste of normal, non-criminal life while Nate was in the military and Poppy was in law school, and found out they preferred it."
> 
> ^Like, this up here is basically how Nick became aware of the Whittakers, because I think at one point in canon it's mentioned that Eddie Winter was an Irish mob boss, and that's who the Whittakers were involved with. There's a few degrees of separation from Eddie Winter, though, but Poppy definitely represented a lot of guys who knew guys who knew Eddie Winter.


	4. Chapter 4

Fort Hagen was rough.

Not just the fighting, though that presented its own set of challenges as well. It must have been the first time Poppy encountered gen 2 synths, because after shooting the first one, she crouched down and stared at it. When she looked back up at Nick, he could see the unsettled thoughts behind her eyes, but she didn't linger there.

Shooting through endless waves of synths, from room to room, Nick could see the tight grip of anticipation on Poppy. There was something almost ravening about her as she smashed from one room to the next, and, increasingly desperate as she was, she also grew reckless.

It got worse as Kellogg began his taunting over the PA system, and Poppy dropped even the pretense of caution. She stuck in doorways, shooting and shooting and shooting while standing there, snarling and defiant. 

A fear began taking hold of Nick, that she wouldn't live long enough to confront Kellogg if she continued like this. When a shot got her in the hip, and she teetered off her feet, Nick finished off the synth that did it and dragged Poppy into a side room, locking the doors.

Rows of bunks and footlockers filled the room, and Nick found a stimpak in one of them. Poppy presented her arm, teeth gritting against the pain, expecting the shot.

Nick... delayed. Holding the stimpak just out of her reach, he looked her in the eye.

"You want to leave here alive?" he asked.

Poppy blinked for a moment, before her expression twisted to annoyance.

"What kind of stupid question is that," she retorted. There was no more polish to her words, no subtle machination. Here she was, raw and split open before Nick, vulnerable like he'd never known her to be. She was brittle with anger.

"You continue like this," Nick said, "and I don't know that you're going to survive. That how you want to play it? You get your son or you die here?"

She was ready to snarl something at him, but then thought better of it. She composed herself, some of the edges visibly smoothing.

"Kellogg knows we're here," she said. "We have to move fast, we don't have the element of surprise anymore."

"You're tired, Whittaker," Nick retorted, as stern as he'd ever been towards anyone. "You're screwing up. And Kellogg's known about us since the moment we stepped into his little fortress. We _never_ had the element of surprise."

"I'm not screwin u--" she started, but then Nick reached down to her thigh and squeezed. It was near enough to the wound on her hip that it pulled at the raw skin, and she hissed. She glared at him. "Won't matter for long."

"Not if you're dead, it won't. You're right on that count. So I'm asking you again. You wanna die?"

"I don't want to die," she said, heavy on each word. "I want Shaun. I only want Shaun."

"And I want to help you get Shaun," Nick said. "That's why I'm setting terms up front. I'm giving you this stimpak, and then you're going to sleep."

Poppy pulled a face at that.

"We don't have time for that," she said.

"We've been in here nearly twenty-four hours, Doll. We're working on a bigger timescale than you think, so you need to make the time," Nick said.

Poppy checked her Pip-boy, surprised by this information, and after a few moments, she slumped in resignation. 

"Ninety minutes," she said, "then you wake me up."

"I'll wake you up, promise. Eat something first," Nick said, and pushed her bag towards her.

Poppy sullenly consented, and Nick finally pressed the needle into her leg, letting her heal. She took out some strips of meat and a bottle of water, scarfing them down, and then curled up on a bunk.

She was in a hurry about falling asleep as she was about anything, but Nick noticed it was at least twenty minutes before the tension seeped from her limbs and she fell into proper sleep. 

He took a blanket off another bunk and gently placed it over her, tucking the edges in. He had no intention of letting her get less than three hours of sleep, and that was at a minimum, so he propped himself near the door, smoking as he kept an ear out for trouble.

In the end, he didn't need to wake her. Almost two hours later, she woke herself up, stood and rolled her stiff limbs, and reloaded her gun. When her cold, stubborn gaze fell on Nick, he knew there was no way he could stand between her and the hell she was going to unleash. For good or ill, this was it. Commonwealth Justice was coming for Kellogg after all.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It all went wrong. Or, at least, it went differently to what either of them was expecting it to go.

It wasn't Poppy with the white gloves who met Kellogg. It was Poppy the miscreant teen to used to bust storefronts for Fingers O'Malley. Though maybe they were the same person, in the end, because when the fighting started, Poppy didn't hesitate, but she did not go in swinging either. She lobbed her grenades and dodged for cover among the rows of computer terminals.

She picked off the gen 2 synths one by one, with grenades and crossfires, and reckless shots from much too up close, that turned out to be less reckless when she deftly separated synths from their weapons and used their bodies as shields. And every time Kellogg came close, she danced just out of his range.

Nick understood what she was doing, chipping away at Kellogg's forces and leaving him for last. Kellogg probably could see it just as well, the way she was telegraphing it. They hadn't exactly managed to plan this in advance, so Nick appreciated the clear plan of action.

Nick switched his gun for a shock baton, and went straight for Kellogg, keeping the wavering outline of the man always within eyesight. Nick weaved close and cracked Kellogg some good hits, for all that he barely seemed to feel them, and then dodged out of the way when Kellogg's attention shifted. All Nick really needed was to keep him distracted, with his focus split between them, and he was going to be the best goddamn distraction Poppy could ask for.

When she finally came barreling into Kellogg, though, there wasn't any finesse to it. She shrieked and got him in a headlock from behind, jabbed an energy rifle into his side, and discharged a dozen shots into his lower torso. Nick was so shocked by this, that he nearly froze, but when Kellogg raised his arm to lift his gun and aim back at Poppy over his shoulder, Nick bludgeoned him good in the arm, making him shoot off into the ceiling instead of Poppy.

Kellogg smelled like cooked meat by the time he managed to dislodge Poppy, and even Poppy's leather jacket was burnt on her side, where the rifle's barrel had been braced against her own body to keep it steady. The whole thing was probably a lot more painful to Poppy than to Kellogg, from the looks of it, even if Kellogg had taken the brunt of the damage.

But Kellogg's Stealth Boy had run out now, and there was no pretense anymore. Poppy and Kellogg tore at each other, and all Nick could do was damage control.

When Kellogg's corpse finally fell to the floor, Poppy dropped to her knees as well, breathing heavily, burnt and bloodied and looking worse for wear.

Nick wasn't panting like she was, but he dropped next to her, asked if she needed a stimpak.

Her hand shot out and she gripped his forearm, turning large desperate eyes to him.

"You said there would be a way," she said, voice threadbare with exhaustion. "You said there would be leads."

"There will be," Nick said. "There are." His hand covered hers, and he gently released her grip from his forearm. Her fingers twitched, unsure what to do now that they were unlatched, and Nick held her hand lightly. "We'll find your boy."

"Kellogg's the only one who knew," Poppy said, horror creeping into her voice as she realized the depths of that implication.

Before Nick could say anything more, Poppy ripped her hand out of Nick's grasp, and lunged for Kellogg's corpse. She searched him all over, stripping him of his armor, even ripping the strange implants from Kellogg's body. There was nothing, no clue about Shaun, no convenient slip of paper or holotape to lead them.

Her breaths were starting to quicken again, not with physical exhaustion, and Nick couldn't let her do this to herself anymore. He pulled her away and dragged her to a corner of the room while she cursed at him and tried to push him away, but he managed to put some distance between her and Kellogg's corpse. He turned her around towards the wall, and grasped her by the shoulders.

"Hey. _Hey_. You're alright now, Doll," he said, shaking her. "We're done here. You're done. You did everything you could for now. We just need to regroup and decide the next course of action."

She looked up at him, face twisting in rage, and then grabbed him by his coat, shoving him backwards against the computer terminals. Nick grunted, more in surprise than pain, as Poppy held him. There was an edge of barely restrained violence to Poppy now, but he didn't do anything yet. He spread his hands out and away, showing he was unarmed, and he watched Poppy's face. They held their positions for a long stretch of time, eye to eye and watching each other in tense expectation, before Poppy's body jerked away from Nick's and she took a single step back.

Her hands were the last to obey her, and she released Nick, smoothing down his lapels. Then she wordlessly pulled off Nick's tie and began redoing the knot, and Nick was dumbfounded for a few seconds.

He watched the flicker of expressions as she started out in fit of apoplectic rage, and then, he saw it start to recede as her hands worked on the tie. Her brow smoothed out with each loop the fabric made, her lips smoothed down from their sneer with each tug of the tie through the loops. Before Nick's very eyes, he saw Poppy compose her mask again, slotting every muscle into place to present no emotion deeper than a slight exasperation, as she worked on a perfect knot. It was a bit unnerving, really.

As she finished and adjusted the collar of his shirt over the tie, she had became herself again.

"You're right, of course," she said, her voice smooth and agreeable. "We need to regroup. We should head back to Diamond City."

And that seemed to be it. Poppy was back to being calm and measured again, and the only hint Nick got that this was only an act was the blank way she would later look at the Brotherhood of Steel's blimp as they made their grand appearance. She was not truly calm, so much as she was burying all of her reactions.

He'd been wrong. Nothing of Poppy had been stripped away. She'd simply not been hiding anything of herself until now. Nick found himself sorry for the change now.

 

 

* * *

 

 

They holed up for the night out in an empty trailer off the main road. Fort Hagen would have been safer, but Fort Hagen was also possibly the worst place for Poppy to be in at the moment.

Poppy dialed up her Pip-boy's light and placed it aside. In the green glow of it, she tended to herself. There were patches where her clothing had become encrusted in stimpak-healed wounds, and she had to tug them out and open her wounds again. It was a gruesome task, and Nick winced in sympathy, but when he reached out to help, Poppy batted his hands away, even as her face grew drawn and pale.

Piece by piece, Poppy discarded her mauled clothing, and Nick averted his eyes as she moved to do so. In his peripheral vision, he caught only the angles between shafts of light as Poppy applied another stimpak and then changed, and when he next looked at her, she was wearing Kellogg's clothing.

"We'll start on the road early in the morning," Poppy said, placing her wide-brimmed hat back on her head.

She leaned back against her bag, propped against the trailer wall, and tilted the hat forwards so it covered her face. Arms crossed, gun in the crook of her arm, she looked every inch the Wasteland tough, just as much as she'd ever looked the polished housewife. Another skin she'd put on, as someone who was good on pulling on any type of skin the situation demanded.

Nick found it eerie; how could he not? This was a kind of you-don't-to-mess-with-me get-up. A rampage-across-the-landscape type of attire. It was getting Nick all worried for what Poppy was going to do--not to him, but to everyone else. Not just to the people who stole her kid, but to everyone else in her path. He was going to be responsible for everything she did from here on out, though frankly it wasn't as if he hadn't felt responsible for her since the moment he came face to face with her in that vault.

"Too bad you can't get some proper sleep," Poppy remarked from under her hat.

"...What?"

"Give it a rest for tonight, Detective," Poppy continued. "Stand-by mode, power down, whatever." She tilted her head up and twisted her wrist, and Nick saw a flash of her eyes in the light of her Pip-boy. "Rest for now. Tomorrow we'll be at it again."

Then she went back to trying to sleep, like she expected no argument from him.

Nick leaned back against the opposite wall of the trailer, and stretched his legs before him. He couldn't sleep, it was true, but he cycled down a lot of his internal processes, and took her advice about resting. He remained aware of his surroundings, because it was always wise to have someone with an eye out in the Wasteland, but his thoughts slowed for a while. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I currently have a nice buffer of chapters, as I post what I had up on the kinkmeme, but as I am approaching the end of the buffer, updates will slow down. I do have some stuff already written past what was up on the kinkmeme, though! So that's coming eventually, too. Just at a slower pace, as of next week.


	5. Chapter 5

_When Abel 'Fingers' O'Malley was finally arrested, the first thing he ever did was cut a deal and flip on his old pals in the mob. Like his nickname suggested, O'Malley really did have a finger in every pie. Racketeering, blackmail, forgery, bootlegging, illegal gambling, smuggling, everything that could be done under the table, O'Malley had perfected._

_It took weeks to depose O'Malley, and he'd requested the presence of his lawyer, none other than Poppy Whittaker. Day in, day out, she'd be trailing after her client in her sharp pantsuits and with her conservative up-do, and the DA hated the woman's guts in a visceral fashion that even Nick wasn't capable of._

_"How the hell can we even claim to have O'Malley, when she's the one actually holding his leash?" the DA complained bitterly one day to Nick, as they both crossed paths at a water cooler in the courthouse hallway._

_The small paper cup was almost crushed in the DA's hand, and he mopped his forehead with a handkerchief, angrily. Two weeks later he'd have a heart attack from the stress, and at that moment he certainly looked the part of a man two weeks away from a heart attack._

_"She's just there to make sure O'Malley doesn't flip on her too," Nick said, voicing what everyone was speculating about Poppy anyway. "She spent years dancing to his tune, and I don't think that just stopped one day. I think she just got better than his regular grunts at it."_

_"Yeah, well, we've barely gotten anything new out of O'Malley, and that's because she makes us work for every goddamn detail. But if she's in as deep as you say, maybe we can find something on her." The DA's face screwed in distaste just then. "Though heavens know what defense lawyer_ she'd _get. I don't think I can handle two of Poppy Whittaker."_

_"Hm. Well," Nick slapped the DA on the shoulder, "you keep at it. She's going to trip up eventually. A word of advice, though, don't try to outsmart her. Just wear her down."_

_"That's worked for you, has it?" the DA laughed._

_"I'll let you know as soon as it has," Nick replied, with a rueful twist to his lips._

_The DA gave a hollow laugh._

 

 

* * *

 

 

It was a bright and cheerful day the next morning as they walked back to Diamond City, and something about the unremitting brightness of the sun contrasted with Poppy's mood just enough to make her cranky. She reached into her pack and took out a pair of sunglasses, placing them over her eyes with a rancorous squint against the sky.

"Shouldn't have killed him," she muttered halfway through the morning. 

Nick thought maybe she wanted him to argue with her, but then, Nick wasn't much on the side of killing in general, so he didn't know what she was trying to achieve.

"Wouldn't have told you much even if you hadn't," he replied half-heartedly, thinking about how relieved he was that he didn't have to witness Poppy torture a man.

Poppy turned her gaze towards Nick; not that he could see her eyes through the dark lenses. 

They were entering the blasted outskirts of Boston, and drew closer to the building walls as they did, dropping their voices. The city was empty and full of echoes. In the distance, there was the rapid pop of gunfire.

"He was a bad man. Do you think it was a good thing I killed him, Detective?" Poppy said.

"Is this about Kellogg?" Nick asked. "Or about you?"

Poppy's lips pressed together in response, and this was reaction enough that he knew he'd hit a bullseye.

"I wonder sometimes if you think losing my husband and my son is what I deserve for being the person you used to know," she said.

"I thought we established already that I wasn't the one who knew you," he said. "Different Nick was."

Poppy pivoted in place just then, putting a hand against the wall and blocking his path. He looked at her placidly.

"See, I don't think it's fair that you should have it both ways," Poppy said. "You don't get to bemoan the fact that you're the pale copy of a guy, and also flagellate yourself over his sins."

"Didn't realize I was doing either, Doll," he replied calmly.

Poppy gave him a tight-lipped smile. She reached out to cup his jaw. The tips of her fingers ran along the broken edge on the side of his face, on the strip where the ragged half-torn sensory nodes were erratically sensitive, and he wasn't sure if Poppy's fingers were cold pinpricks of ice, or burning points along his skin.

"How about we split the difference?" he said. "Why don't you tell me what you thought of _him_?"

A smile bloomed across Poppy's face slowly, but with her eyes hidden, he wasn't sure what to make of it.

"He was a good guy," Poppy said softly, running her fingers over his lips, "and the world socked him in the mouth for it."

Her fingers were cool and soft at the tips, and unnervingly real. He took Poppy's hand, and lowered it from his face. It was a two hundred year old question, and Poppy's answer did not satisfy him as much as he thought. The Whittakers had never seemed the type who held good people in any esteem.

"That why you and Nate were the way you were? You didn't want to get 'socked in the mouth'?" he asked.

Poppy's smile turned sardonic.

"That happened before we ever got the chance to be good, Detective," she said. "I guess it would be easier to make you sympathize with us if I could tell you that Nate's parents slapped him around, or that my dad was a drunk. But the truth is, they were all good people. Nate's parents worked themselves raw to put his brothers through college, and my dad toiled every day to pay my mother's medical bills, until long after she was dead. Since the day we were born, Nate and I saw first hand that the world only kicks good people while they're down. It taught us that the only people who can afford to be kind and soft are the people who can _afford_ everything in general."

"Those folks in your old neighborhood, whose livelihoods you and Nate smashed up? They were good people too," he groused.

"Like I said," Poppy replied, "the world kicks good people while they're down. If Nate and I hadn't been the ones doing it, Fingers would've just gotten strangers to do the same work, and they would've been far less sympathetic than we ever were."

He snorted, shook his head. This was as candid as Poppy had ever been about her criminal activities, and yet she had nothing but rationalizations for her behavior.

"You're not taking me seriously," Poppy said, the slightest tinge of disappointment to her voice. "You think I'm making excuses, when I'm actually trying to explain how things worked. This kind of thing is exactly why you never caught me, Detective."

"Why _he_ never caught you," Nick corrected.

Poppy rolled her shoulder in a loose shrug. She turned on her heel and began walking again, and Nick caught up in a few long strides.

"Did he ever even come close to catching you?" he asked.

Poppy turned her beaming smile on him then.

"Sure," she said. "Think about it."

 

 

* * *

 

 

On the way back to Diamond City, they ran across a woman pleading for help, just outside Hardware Town. From the first moment, Nick could sense something just a little bit off about it, some undefinable quality making the whole situation suspect. She was too loud, too trusting, and she might have just been naive and telling the truth about her friend needing help inside, but he somehow didn't quite believe it.

Poppy gave her most guileless look to the woman, and promised to help, but after the woman turned around and ran inside the store, Poppy turned to Nick with a lopsided smile and a roll of the eyes. She evidently expected that Nick had picked up on the incongruence of the situation as well.

"Follow my lead," Poppy said.

And he did as much. It was clear something dangerous was afoot, and he was willing to bet his hat they were neither the first people to be lured in, nor would they be the last if they didn't put a stop to this. He readied his pistol and prepared for a firefight.

Poppy, on the other hand, did not. She pressed a finger to her lips ( _Shh_ ) and crept along the walls.

They heard the raiders soon enough, scolding the woman who had been bait that she should have lured them in through the basement, and Poppy gave Nick another look.

"Mm-hmm," she hummed, the words _just as expected_ packed into the tone of it.

Yet she didn't go in shooting. Instead, she took him along the other door, away from the ambush. 

They ended up in the basement anyway, regardless of any trap, and ran across the pile of stripped bodies which evidenced the activities of the building's residents. Poppy's nose wrinkled, probably at the smell, but she didn't seem otherwise phased. She stripped the place bare of all the chems and ammo she could find, and then led him right out through the basement door, without running into anyone or firing any shots.

Outside the basement door were two more raiders, but they were not in view of the door. They were on the other side of a large abandoned vehicle, and had no inkling about Poppy and Nick emerging. As one was telling the other an engaging story about one of the Wasteland's more eccentric denizens, Poppy searched through her bag, and plucked out a grenade.

She politely waited until the story was over to roll the fragmentation grenade over to their feet, and only after it went off, throwing the two raiders around like ragdolls, did she emerge and finish them off with some well-placed shots.

"You're not going to do anything about that lot inside?" Nick asked.

Poppy paused from rifling through the dead raiders' pockets to look up at him.

"I just stole all their chems," Poppy said. "The moment they start getting a hankering and notice their stashes are gone, they'll just be a bunch of paranoid junkies in withdrawal, and they'll remember every axe they've had to grind with one another. Trust me, I've done enough. Sometimes you need to let the Commonwealth clean itself up, Detective."

Nick's lips pursed, uncertain if he approved or not, but he couldn't exactly argue with that. Raiders tended to turn on each other as easily as they turned on the rest of the populace, and it took very little to destabilize even their most solid operations.

Though, knowing the Wasteland, the corpses probably wouldn't even be cool before some other, more vicious gang moved in.

He thought again that Poppy seemed uniquely suited to the Wasteland; cunning and vicious in perfect proportion. He wondered if she wanted to be, though. He thought back to her stamping down on her rage by knotting his tie, and wondered if maybe she missed being something different. He thought back on how she put away her bat once before, and wondered if she wanted nothing more than to put away her gun after she found Shaun.

It was true she'd known a different Nick, before. Maybe it was time to consider that he might know a different Poppy now, and not keep measuring her against the image of her past so constantly.

It was difficult when her every word or gesture caused memories to jab through his brain, thoughts and impressions which were not his own but that he couldn't help having. Wasn't in his constitution to be fair to her, maybe, but she was right on one score, and that was that he couldn't insist he wasn't that guy and yet act on his memories like he was. 

Having Poppy around was like being stuck in a memory pod against his will sometimes; sick of the program but unable to exit. 

Now there was a thought. Nick patted his pockets for cigarettes as an idea bloomed in his head. He wondered what his old pal Doctor Amari was doing these days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Starting next chapter, it's going to be new material, that hasn't been posted to the kinkmeme yet.
> 
> Also, [here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLcL2D6XKKs) the anecdote that you overhear from the Raider when coming out of Hardware Town through the back way. Trust me, you'll want to hear this one.


	6. Chapter 6

Nick arrived in Diamond City just in time for the latest edition of Publick Occurences. Nat pushed an issue of the paper on him, and he obediently gave up a handful of caps for it, but he didn't pay much attention to the paper. Instead his gaze followed Poppy as she was swallowed up by the market crowds; off to do more of her errands, or barter for supplies.

"Say, Nat," he turned his attention back to the young girl, "don't suppose you might let your sister know to drop in by my office later, so I can run some things by her?" 

Nat narrowed her eyes at Nick, sizing him up for cash. In all likelihood, Piper would seek him out anyway, just out of her own unquenchable curiosity. But Piper's little sister had the tenacity that only growing up in the Wasteland gave to kids.

"Maybe if I had a little something to jog my memory," she said, in her best approximation of a narrow-eyed blackmailer. Since she was chin-high standing on her soap box, it just came across as precocious and somewhat cute.

Nick knew he probably shouldn't be encouraging her mercenary streak so much, but he dropped another handful of caps in Nat's hand, and she gave him a girlish grin and a promise to tell Piper about dropping in at the agency.

He tipped his hat in thanks, and strolled off, the issue of Publick Occurences under her arm. In all honestly, he didn't even glimpse the first page until he was back in the office. That was when he saw Ellie's copy of the newspaper neatly folded on her own desk, with the headline etched across the page like it was jumping at him from a news stand.

He opened his own paper then; it hardly surprised him at this point that Poppy had not only already met Piper, but had sat down for an interview. He couldn't fault either woman for that. Piper had a reporter's hunger for any novelty, and Poppy had the socialite's instinct for endearing herself to the masses.

Poppy said some nice things about hope in there, too. Gave Nick some hope of his own to hang his hat on, that maybe Poppy wouldn't be so bad for the Commonwealth as he'd been expecting. Later he'd notice that Diamond City certainly seemed heartened by her words, and immediately sympathetic to her mission to find her son. Whether through sincerity or manipulation, he couldn't deny the end result was beneficial to all parties involved.

"Nick, you're back!" Ellie said, as she strolled into the office.

"Sure am," Nick agreed.

Ellie's expression turned cautious. She knew very well where he and Poppy had been off to, but since Poppy wasn't there, she didn't know what the end result was yet.

"How did it go?" she asked.

He sighed in response, and this only managed to alarm Ellie.

"Not as bad as it could have," Nick waved off her concern, and told her what happened in broad strokes: tracked down Kellogg, but the man himself was a dead end. No little boy found.

Ellie was predictably broken up on Poppy's behalf about how things went down, but he tried his best to cheer her up. This wasn't a cold case yet, if he had anything to say about it.

Piper arrived later, and he gave her a slightly less edited account of all the events at Fort Hagan.

Poppy slipped through the door as he was wrapping up the story, and Piper reached out to Poppy, grasping her arm and squeezing it in support. Poppy gave Piper a tight smile in response, just the right amount of anguished to strum at Piper's heartstrings. Nick cut off this line of thought and brought up Doctor Amari.

It seemed, to his surprise, that Poppy had met Doctor Amari as well--though why this stuff still surprised him anymore, he had no clue. That woman might well have gotten on first name basis with the entire Commonwealth while he was trapped in Vault 114.

Could have wasted away in a memory pod in the meantime, too, Nick considered, as he lit himself a cigarette. She had enough happy memories of her family, of living off the spoils of her life of crime, or of outwitting every cop in Boston to last her 'til she withered away in one of those pods. But no, that didn't seem Poppy's style. As long as she had a son to find or skulls to bash in, as long as there was still something she could do, she didn't seem the type to wallow.

At any rate, while Piper was still grimacing in disgust at the mention of Kellogg's brain, Poppy had already dug out the cybernetic implants she'd ripped out of the man's head. She upended the lunch box she'd stuffed them in, and let the implants tumble across Nick's desk along with other small miscellanea she'd taken off his body.

At the time, it had seemed an unnecessarily brutal detail, some last act of vengeance she took upon Kellogg's body to dig out the implants out of the scattered remains of the man's brains. Now, cold pragmatism turned that decision into good foresight on Poppy's part.

Well, no use delaying, Nick supposed. The sooner they got the... items, to Doctor Amari, the sooner they could wash their hands of the whole grisly affair.

Piper agreed.

"Whether we're riding this crazy brain train or not," Piper said to Poppy, "we can't all go running around the Commonwealth. So, who's coming with you?" 

"I have to go to the Memory Den either way," Nick pointed out. "But if you want to head there together, just say the word."

He caught Poppy's eye, and she paused. She actually seemed to consider the question, before nodding towards Piper and asking her along.

"All right. See you at the Den," Nick said numbly.

A strange thing, to feel a twinge of betrayal in a relationship where he had never had an expectation of loyalty. He hadn't been disappointed when they'd split off before, so why would he feel that way now?

Nick racked his positronic brains, and he still couldn't figure out where or when things had changed. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So we're kicking off some new content from here on out, not published on the kink meme, and I'm going to see how long I can keep this train rolling!


	7. Chapter 7

Nick arrived in Goodneighbor alone, and ahead of Poppy and Piper.

It gave him some time to catch up with old clients still haunting around the place. Someone offered to buy him a drink, and then backpedaled with embarrassment when they realized there was a part of that equation missing, and Nick laughed it off without any rancor; he could appreciate the sentiment, even if the offer itself failed in execution.

Eventually, Nick also let himself be cornered by Hancock, who fancied the two of them old friends, and whose illusions Nick didn't bother shattering. Not many people from Diamond City knew Hancock from back in the day, and many of those weren't precisely feeling warm towards the ghoul. Last Nick knew, Mayor McDonough was still firmly denying having a living brother. Of course, last he knew, Hancock was firm on not disowning his brother just because he knew how much it got on the man's nerves to be related to Hancock. Family. Hell of a thing.

"So. What lost soul you helpin' out now, Nick?" Hancock asked, as he popped a couple of Mentats in his mouth. He chewed on them, and the sound of the pills cracking between his teeth was sharp and chalky.

"Might know her," Nick said, taking a drag of his cigarette; his own vices were much quieter. "Poppy Whittaker."

Hancock swallowed his Mentats and whistled.

"You met her too, huh?" Hancock asked, a glint in his black eyes. "Hell of a woman. Like some ghost out of those old magazines. With the sunglasses and the dress."

"And white gloves," Nick added, staring off across the road, towards the Memory Den.

In the daytime, it looked smaller. The neon sign seemed to make the building loom at night, though. Bright and loud over Goodneighbor, with promises far bigger than most people who walked through the door could handle. People could waste away their lives in those pods; Nick almost did, and he didn't even have the defense of a vulnerable organic brain making all his bad decisions for him.

"She really from the old days?" Hancock asked, and Nick knew exactly why Hancock was asking him this.

"The genuine article," Nick said, "for good or for ill."

"She helped some people around Goodneighbor. Seems like the decent enough sort," Hancock said cautiously. 

"Seems that way, doesn't she?" Nick said, just as cautiously.

"Yeah, but you'd be helping her find her son anyway, huh?" Hancock continued, eyes narrowing. "For a guy whose innards are mostly metal, you're real soft-hearted."

"Common misconception, a lot of me is actually fiberglass," Nick corrected, slanting a smile towards Hancock.

"Don't let the scavvers hear, that shit's more valuable than gold out there," Hancock returned, and then asked to bum a cigarette off Nick.

Soon enough, dusk fell and the Memory Den's flickered to life in the twilight. Nick and Hancock fell quiet, and listened to its buzz for a while longer before taking their leave of each other.

 

 

* * *

 

 

When all was said and done, they did manage to shake something loose out of Kellogg's little bits of gray matter. If the results would prove to be worth the ride, well, that remained to be seen. For now, Poppy had a destination, and a goal she could focus on, even if that was a likely doomed trip into the Glowing Sea.

Nick had a feeling she might be able to handle things on her own from this point on. She was more capable than most of his clients, and he could very well have let her go on her own way. But he couldn't help wanting to see this thing through. It seemed like a lot of heartache to undergo without there being a resolution, and that was damn unfair.

He waited for Poppy, seated by the entrance. He smoked his last cigarette down to the stub, and put it out in an ashtray, and he waited. If she was going to swan off, least he wanted to do was see her off. 

She finished off with Doctor Amari eventually, and walked over to him. Nick was ready to say something--not sure what, but something. They'd had a hell of a day together, and strange how having your brains hooked up together for a stroll down homicidal kidnapper lane could make you feel real close to someone.

But then it felt like he blinked, his perceptions doing a jump-cut, and suddenly Poppy looked spooked.

Nick couldn't remember ever seeing Poppy spooked before; wasn't sure he knew how to handle it.

"Nick, you feeling all right?" she asked, eyes wide and showing more of the whites than they ought.

"Sure, Doll, I'm fine. Why?" he replied--what happened to put that look on her face?

She reached out slowly to him, fingers curling uncertainly in the air before one hand touched his shoulder.

"You sounded like Kellogg just now," Poppy explained, and her fingers slid up his shoulders and towards his collar. She straightened it, buttoned him up, adjusted his tie and smoothed down his lapels.

Nick was thrown for a loop, both by Poppy's words, and her strangely tactile display of concern.

"...Did I?" he asked. "Doctor Amari said there'd be some 'mnemonic impressions' left over..."

Poppy looked down at him, her concern receding like the last sunlight behind her mask of composure.  And Nick looked up at her, irrationally feeling like his mouth was too dry, even though this was how dry his mouth always was. He swallowed pointlessly, got no relief from the action.

"Anyway, I feel fine, so let's get going," he said, getting up, as if being in motion could hide his awkwardness.

Poppy acquiesced, or at least she was too taken aback to protest, and Nick felt like he finagled himself into her company, but he'd never really intended it that way.

Instead, having figured out a piece of her puzzle, he was now condemned to want to figure out the rest.

For some time, he'd been picking through every shard of memory he'd had of the Whittakers, trying to figure out when old Nick had ever been close to catching the couple. Not like Poppy could protest, she'd been the one to tell him to think about it.

Well, now he thought about it, and the thing he'd figured about Poppy was that he'd seen her fuss with a tie before. Somewhere in his brain was lodged a memory, like a shard stuck in crosswise. He couldn't place it chronologically, but it was like this: _through the cracked door of a police station room, he could see the Whittakers like glimpsing actors through a cracked curtain, moving backstage._

_The Whittakers were in a police station hallway, and Nick remembered watching as a superior officer droned in his ear about not enough evidence, as Poppy undid her husband's perfectly fastidious tie, and re-did the knot, her hands moving surely and nimbly._

_Nate had had an inscrutable look, but then again, there had never seemed much to scrutinize there. The man had a brow like a caveman, and a scowl like a hungry bear. He stayed still under his wife's ministrations, and when she was done and she'd replaced his perfectly fine knot with an even more perfect knot, he leaned down and kissed his Poppy's cheek. Just a brush of the lips, not enough to smear her carefully applied make-up, but then she'd looked up at Nate and smiled._

_Nick hadn't really understood at the time. In light of his failure to book the couple, their every gesture seemed to mock him. He'd thought the smile was Poppy gloating, and his blood had boiled._

Strange that it took a couple of centuries and a different body to finally get this strangely intimate insight about Poppy, but she hadn't been gloating, not a bit. That had been Poppy as worried as he'd ever made her feel, and he'd completely missed it.

Nate hadn't, though, Nick was sure. Nate might not have been the brains of the operation, but he'd likely been at the receiving end of a Windsor knot enough times that he'd learned to recognize his wife's worry in every loop.

Another piece of bitter irony, he supposed. Without Nate, it seemed like Poppy didn't have much of a selection of men wearing ties for her to fuss over. She was down to just ol' Nick. After enough time, maybe an old enemy was the closest thing left to an old friend.


	8. Chapter 8

Poppy purchased herself a room for the night at the Rexford, but that evening she ended up sitting in the lobby. It was hushed, especially compared to the Third Rail at night. Whatever forbidding atmosphere hotel lobbies used to have that made people shuffle quietly along and not want to make too much noise, it seemed to have survived nuclear annihilation. 

So Poppy sat herself on a sofa in the lobby, with a notepad and a pencil. She'd asked some questions at first, of anyone who could answer. First about how much Rad-X and Radaway cost, which the assorted individuals around the lobby could answer by offering all the prices they'd paid for the stuff and averaging it, and then some questions about duration and full effect, which Fred Allen answered in exhaustive detail. Nick was almost impressed that the man had extensive knowledge on subjects other than recreational chems.

At any rate, having received the information she needed, Poppy wrote it all down on her notepad, sorted in a neat table at the top of the first page.

Then she pulled up a map on her Pip-Boy, and added some new numbers. Distance estimates, and duration of travel approximations, which she put into a separate table. Then she raised her estimates considerably, which Nick thought was good sense. Who knew what kind of obstacles a place like the Glowing Sea could throw up?

Poppy didn't speak much after asking her questions and getting her answer, but her pencil moved across the page of the notepad, not just scratching out calculations, but making the numbers dance. How much Rad-X she'd need, how much Radaway would last her, how many days, how many miles, how much Rad-X to Radaway would be most efficient--and at this point she threw in some weight calculations as well, in a long equation that made Nick dizzy as Poppy settled on the perfect Radaway-to-Rad-X ratio.

She didn't speak, only frowned as she filled the first page, then the next, and the next after that. At one point she turned the pencil and tried to erase some mistake she'd made, but the eraser slipped across the page without effect, ossified by time, and Poppy absent-mindedly bit the eraser in half, exposing its pink center and using it to erase an entire line in earnest. It was like seeing a strange echo of a schoolgirl she might have once been, a truly unguarded moment that Nick filed away to consider later.

At some point, though, she stopped bothering with erasing anything. She crossed out mistakes furiously: whole lines, half of an entire page, dismissed with deep, decisive lines. She wore the pencil tip down to a nub several time, and for lack of a pencil sharpener, took out a knife and whittled the pencil until it was sharp again.

She circled other things as well, boxing in numbers and formulas she was pleased with. Quantities and sums were slowly eked out of the calculations, crowded together at the bottom of pages with cramped labels, and then, when she was done, she transcribed it all at the end on the notepad. She'd run out of pages by the time she was done, so she wrote the results on the notepad's cardboard backing.

Hours had passed by that point, melted away by Poppy's mathematical fugue, and Nick had to stop his face from showing how surprised he was. This was never a part of her he'd have guessed at. He didn't think she learned calculus from racketeering, though Nick wasn't sure why he'd assume she hadn't done well in school.

Well, Nick mused, maybe he did know why he assumed. Criminals didn't tend towards academic brilliance. And though he knew she'd graduated Law School, Nick still had the policeman's natural prejudice against lawyers, considering them to be just a slicker class of criminal.

Poppy sighed and dropped the notepad down on the coffee table in front of her, and she stretched, her shoulders cracking after so much time spent with her neck bent over a notepad. She wasn't getting any younger.

"Numbers not adding up?" Nick asked. He'd sat perfectly still this entire time, observing Poppy as she did her calculations. Advantage of being a synth: he didn't need to stretch as much.

"Adding up is precisely the problem," Poppy muttered. "We're going to need a lot of caps."

She stared at the notepad, apparently ruminating on its contents for a few moments.

"I'm going to need to take some jobs," she decided, more firmly, and straightened up, looking at Nick. "And I'm going to take Hancock along."

"Hancock," Nick echoed.

"They're not all going to be missing person cases, Nick," Poppy replied, a smile ghosting across her face. "And I certainly wouldn't keep you from the valuable service you provide."

She stood up, and Nick stood up with her. They found themselves staring at each other quietly, perhaps for longer than was usual, without speaking. Nick wasn't sure what to say, anyway. If she had Hancock with her, she'd hardly need him. And even though maybe she thought Hancock might be more amenable to the kinds of jobs she intended to take, Nick at least knew that when the chips were down, Hancock was a stand-up guy. So either way, Nick wasn't going to be anything but superfluous.

"I'll see you in Diamond City, next time I'm in the neighborhood," Poppy offered, and to Nick's surprise, that was something of a comfort, to know he wasn't a toy she'd put aside when she finished playing.

"If you ever want to drop in at the agency, I'm sure I'll have some cold case for you to dig into," Nick offered. "Not much in the way of pay, but every cap counts."

Poppy smiled in earnest this time. Or he thought it was in earnest. At any rate, she leaned closed, and her lips brushed against his cheek.

"Yes, it does," she said as she pulled back.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Nick returned to Diamond City, and to his life, such as it was. There was always new work coming in, always a new runaway, or deadbeat, or missing family member to keep him running around the Commonwealth.

His life after meeting Poppy again wasn't that much different from his life before she found him in Vault 114, except in that he found himself plagued by more of old Nick's memories. 

Not just about Poppy, either. She might have been the crack that brought this levee down, but now Nick was remembering a lot of things that weren't even related to her. A slanting beam of sunlight through a window made him recall Jenny's hair on a summer's day. The precise shape a plume of cigarette smoke took made him remember a stake-out in a rainy alley. The rattle of caps, like the sound of the vending machine at the police station, the one that Gary Eales always cursed and kicked at whenever it ate his money.

Old obsessions followed suit. Sad to say that old Nick could let himself be consumed by his investigations, and if it hadn't been a healthy habit at the time, it certainly wasn't any more now, two hundred years and one beat up synth body later.

So Nick found himself standing in front of a filing cabinet, the Eddie Winter case notes in one hand, and the single holotape he'd recovered in his other hand. Nine more tapes left, and Nick had always promised himself he'd keep an eye out, and then that he'd let it go, and then that he would maybe look for them one day, but not today.

And there was Poppy out there, mind like a woodchipper, reducing problems to their smallest manageable parts. Faced with a seemingly unsurmountable task, she sat down with a pencil and a notepad and brute-forced a solution with _math_. What had Nick done over the decades about Winter, except dither?

Nick weighed the file and the holotape in his hands, and his mind weighed the possibilities, and what he came away with, was that he really could use the help of someone with a mind like a woodchipper.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Nick continued working. Life ticked on, after all, and people went on losing things, and he went on finding them. He closed a missing persons case, and in the same settlement got a request to track down some piece of property accidentally bartered before the owner realized how much more valuable it really was. Nick ended up tracking the trader through a string of settlements so small and insignificant, that most typical trading routes didn't even acknowledge them.

His path took a wide arc north of Diamond City, and then towards the west.

He finally tracked down Trashcan Carla to Drumlin Diner, propping up a wall and smoking. There was an entire ring of cigarette butts fanned out around her in a circle of debris that was almost impressive. When Nick walked up to her, she threw her cigarette half-finished to the ground and lit up a new one. Didn't offer Nick one.

Nick hadn't busted anyone for littering since he was a rookie beat cop, but just watching Trashcan Carla shed so many cigarettes was giving him the itch to do so again. He spared an amused thought just to imagine marching her into Diamond City lock-up and explaining the crime of littering to the guards there.

He requested to see her wares, and while she huffed with contempt--didn't like synths, apparently, but liked caps well enough--she opened up the packs on her brahmin and let him browse.

Nick picked through the junk slowly, inspected some things closely. He got himself a new lighter he could use, a packetwatch he couldn't, some ammo he was running low on; he found the misplaced component that his client had accidentally sold off, but didn't give it any more attention than he did any of the other stuff he was buying. Carla was watching him like a hawk, and at the slightest suspicion the item was valuable, she'd fleece him for all he had.

He got the stuff for the caps his client had given him, and for some loose junk Nick had in his pockets, and he could swear Carla was more taken with the pocket trash than the actual caps, but that suited Nick just fine. Took all kinds, after all.

"Headin' back east after this?" Nick asked as he carefully placed the component in his pocket.

"Nah, goin' up to Sanctuary Hills," Carla muttered as she counted her caps houndishly. "Place gettin' set up again, they gon' have lotta good stuff to trade." Then she looked up at Nick, narrowing her eyes. "Be our secret, though. Can't let anyone else know, muscle in on Trashcan Carla's territory."

Sanctuary Hills. Nick had a few seconds in which he couldn't recall where he'd heard that name, before realizing that back in Diamond City, he'd had his file on Vault 111 still open on his desk, neatly annotated with the name of the nearby suburbs as he'd heard it from his contacts. Somewhere down that way, Nick knew, there'd be a weather-worn house, eaten by time like a sweater by moths, with a mailbox that said 'The Whittakers', if the paint hadn't faded off yet.

_Trust but verify_.

What did he expect to see there, though? Scene of the crime? Some proof that the Whittakers really did live like upstanding citizens, among unsuspecting  civilians, for some short stretch before the world went to ruin?

Nick couldn't think how that would help.

When he left the Drumlin Diner, though, he turned north. Curiosity killed the cat, he supposed.

When he got there, he wasn't going to be able to access the vault. But he'd certainly meet some interesting folks in Sanctuary Hills.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

It was weeks down the line by the time Poppy returned to Diamond City; maybe months. Her hair had grown long, her bangs now falling in a loose backsweep along the side of her face, the rest of her hair scraped back into a pony-tail. She wore sunglasses, and instead of Kellogg's armored leathers, she wore a loose leather jacket proclaiming "Atom Cats" on the back and a pair of jeans. 

Hancock wasn't with her anymore. Instead she was accompanied by some fellow who also wore sunglasses and a pompadour that Nick was pretty sure was a wig.

"He went back for another stint of mayoring," Poppy explained about Hancock. "But Deacon has deigned to take time out of his busy schedule and accompany me for a time."

"Oh yeah," Deacon declared, putting a hand to his heart like the sacrifice pained him, "I just barely managed to rip myself away from my busy busy schedule. We're doing the Commonwealth tour, finding all new exciting places to get shot at."

Nick could already tell two things about Deacon; the first that the man could act like a shiftless layabout with nothing better to do, and second that he was anything but. If Nick had still had a cop's gut, then his gut intuition would've been tripping wild around Deacon.

"We've had a full schedule, as you might guess," Poppy drawled, her face unreadable behind the glasses. 

Nick could imagine. Lots of places to get shot at, in the Commonwealth. And this new guy seemed like the spitting image of trouble. Something about Poppy's manner around Deacon made Nick suspect that she knew exactly what shade of delinquent Deacon was, and that she found a good use for it.

"Been doing a bit of traveling myself," Nick said, leaning against his desk.

"Hm?" Poppy was leafing through one of his cold case files, halfway through deciding if she was going to take it or not.

Timing couldn't have been better, because Nick heard Ellie's voice outside, funneled by the narrow walkway up to the agency door.

"Dropped in on Sanctuary Hills earlier this month," Nick added quickly, just as the agency door scraped open.

Poppy turned uncertainly towards Nick, folder still open in her hands, but the pages now neglected. He couldn't see her eyes, but her head was angled towards him, and he knew he had her hooked for the next part.

Ellie walked in, and Poppy raised her hand in greeting, but that didn't garner much of a reaction otherwise. But then just on Ellie's heels, a Mr. Handy unit hovered through the doorway, maneuvering one limb at a time carefully inside. It was also helpfully holding a bag of supplies from the market.

There was a moment of all around surprise: Ellie at seeing Poppy, and Poppy at seeing the Mr. Handy, and the Mr. Handy at seeing Poppy.

"Miss Poppy, it's you!" the Mr. Handy declared effusively. "Oh, mum, I thought I'd never see you again!"

" _Codsworth?_ " Poppy said, absolutely incredulous. Her voice was faint, as if coming from far away, but that was, undoubtedly, surprise in it.

"The same! Oh, Miss Poppy, you've no idea how badly you've been missed at home!" Codsworth gestured emphatically as he spoke, and considering the size of his arms, that was quite a lot of emphasis.

Poppy dropped the folder she was holding back onto the desk, with uncharacteristic lack of grace.

"Well," she said, her head craning back like she was trying to take in Nick and Codsworth both with one gaze, "nobody seems to stay missing for long when Detective Valentine is on the case."

Nick honestly couldn't tell if that was praise or sarcasm, but he smiled nonetheless. It wasn't just Poppy who could keep people on their toes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, next chapter I'm going to change perspectives and make it a whole Poppy PoV chapter. I just realized that I can use it to give a bunch of background stuff on her that wouldn't come up otherwise, and hopefully you all will enjoy that.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, so how about that Fallout 76 announcement, huh? Really put me right back into the Fallout mood!

_It was a sweltering summer in Boston that year, though just about every summer seemed more sweltering than the last. Poppy had taken to sleeping with her window open, not all that mindful of bugs, but that morning she didn't know if it was the traffic or the heat that woke her._

_She sat in bed, limbs splayed out, nightgown rucked up to expose as much skin as possible to the air, but there wasn't even a breeze to bring relief from the oppressive heat. In a torpor, Poppy stared at the ceiling as dawn approached, and the gray light slowly crept across the phosphorescent stars painted on the ceiling, snuffing the last of their green glow. Mom had painted those, back when 'Poppy's room' had still been 'Poppy's nursery'._

_It wasn't long before she heard Dad shuffle down the hallway, towards the kitchen. There was the rattle of the fridge door being opened as Dad scrounged for breakfast. He'd gotten in late the night before, and he would be going to work early again, working the punishing amounts of overtime that would see Mom's medical bills finally paid. It was Saturday. It was barely five in the morning. It was too hot, and Poppy was thinking about how she would turn on the air conditioning after Dad left. Just for a little bit, so it wouldn't run the electricity bill too high, but she needed some reprieve from the heat._

_As she was fantasizing about the cooling huff of the AC, Poppy realized she heard the fridge door open, but didn't hear it close again. Had she imagined the sound? No, that couldn't be it._

_She got up from bed, and opened her bedroom door to peek out. A tongue of yellow light extended over the kitchen threshold; definitely from the fridge, judging by the angle, and now Poppy was curious enough to check on it._

_Her feet were bare, and made no sound against the floor as she stopped in the kitchen doorway. Dad was in front of the open fridge, staring at its contents--or lack of them, at this time of month._

_For a few seconds, she thought maybe Dad was enjoying the coolness from the fridge before he had to wedge himself in a hot car and drive to the office. But there were dark circles carved deep under his eyes, and deep, tired grooves in the lines of his face. From this angle, Poppy could see one of the streaks of white at his temple, which had appeared ever since Mom died. He didn't look like someone cooling off, he looked like a profoundly tired man whose fatigued mind had wandered off mid-task._

_Poppy stepped into the kitchen uncertainly, and the motion seemed to stir Dad out of his haze. He turned to look at her, and he blinked rapidly, before his expression softened._

_"Morning, pumpkin. You're up early," he said, taking out the milk and butter from the fridge._

_Poppy nodded, and turned to the breadbox, opening it. There were a few, slightly dry slices still left, and she shoved to of them into the toaster._

_"It's too hot," she said. "Couldn't sleep."_

_"Heat wave's going to break soon, you'll see," he said. It was what he always said, when he didn't want anyone to turn on the AC. "Is anything else wrong? How's school?"_

_"Dad, it's Saturday," Poppy pointed out. "In August."_

_He flinched, as if the passage of time had played some trick on him._

_"Huh, you're right," he said, scratching his cheek. He hadn't shaved, probably in days, and his beard was coming in salt-and-pepper. "Growing up fast," he added in a lower voice._

_Poppy gave a half-shrug. The toaster hummed along as the smell of toast filled the air._

_"Rations are coming around again on Monday," Poppy said suddenly._

_There was a flash of panic in Dad's eyes. He would be working on Monday, of course he would. He couldn't go to pick up their rations. But the car would need gas, and they'd need food._

_He took out his wallet, and reached in to remove their ration card; it had their surname on it, 'Sterling' emblazoned across its surface in neatly typed letters._

_"You know where the rationing site is, right, pumpkin?" he asked, his hands a bit shaky._

_"Dad, you need to be an adult to pick up rations," Poppy said, frowning as she stared at that card._

_"They never check," he said, shaking his head, "and besides, you've grown so tall lately. They won't think to check. Just act like you have every right to be there, and they won't look twice at you."_

_Poppy pursed her lips, ready to protest. But then she looked in her father's face, at the deep lines of premature aging, the streaks of white in his hair._

_"I'll figure something out," Poppy said in the end, taking the ration card._

_"'Atta girl," he said, and the corner of his lip quirked up. There used to be a lopsided grin he always gave to her, and to Mom, back when he still had the energy for it. Seeing his attempt at it now wrenched at something inside Poppy, something which had grown up too quickly in too short a time._

_She stuffed the ration card into her pocket, and her mind buzzed as she plotted._

 

__

* * *

 

Morning crept in, cold and gray at first, diffuse light crawling against the ceiling before the sun had even cracked over the horizon. Poppy was already awake and staring at the ceiling, her eyes stinging with fatigue, but her mind running to fast to rest.

She rose from her bedroll, careful not to disturb Deacon, who was stretched in his own bedroll next to hers, and still soundly drooling into his pillow.

Poppy stepped over Deacon, and then stepped over the tripwire they'd improvised at the door, with some fishing line and a bunch of tin cans. She crept out of the abandoned suburb house and out to the back yard, where a patio table and two and a half chairs had weathered the centuries. A sad flamingo was tilting towards the ground nearby, and Poppy straightened it upwards so it could enjoy the sunrise with her.

She watched the horizon listlessly, pulling her jacket tight against the morning cold, and mentally went through what she planned to do.

'Go back to Diamond City' was her initial, irrational instinct, even though there was not much else she could accomplish in Diamond City that she couldn't anywhere else.

So she looked to go in her other direction: she'd go back to Graygarden.

When she'd first stumbled out of the vault, she'd angled away from Sanctuary Hills. She could see the blasted remains of her neighborhood, and knew exactly what she'd find; nothing. She would see only the husk of a former life she'd once wanted so badly. So she squelched that bit of sentimentality, and decided to go east.

Graygarden had been like something out of a fever dream, in contrast to the danger and desolation of the Wasteland she'd encountered thus far. But it had also been a strange comfort. The robots there were something almost like company, and not human enough to care that she had crawled out of the wilds, bloody and filthy and starved.

They also didn't mind when she took food from the greenhouse and ate, and at the time that had been Poppy's primary concern. 

So she ate, and she slept on the hard ground, and she went off again, in a different direction. In those early days, any direction was just as good. She'd had no idea where to find Kellogg.

But then she'd always returned to Graygarden. At first to restore the water treatment facility, and secure clean water for the crops there, but after that, given how welcome she found herself, she simply moved in. She built herself a little shack, and over the course of repeated returns, managed to turn the shack into an actual residence. She would certainly recall fondly the afternoon she spent lugging a couch in power armor, and tell Shaun all about it once he was back in her arms.

That was, after all, what it always came back to. The extra bed that she did not use, the stack of comic books that got ever higher on the nightstand next to it, the toys, the lunch boxes with knick-knacks and the books on varieties of subjects that she collected, because she did not know what her baby boy would grow up to like. 

Poppy felt like she was setting herself up for heartbreak each time she added some new item to the pile, but she could not stop herself.

The sun had risen now, steady golden light piercing right into her eyes and giving her a headache. She put her sunglasses on, smoothing out her scowl, rubbing fingers against her forehead as if she could wipe off the wrinkles. Don't frown, baby, you'll start looking old like your mama, her mother had always joked when Poppy was a child. She'd never seemed old back then. Poppy never saw any wrinkles on Mom's face until the cancer was far along into eating her insides, and the radiotherapy was far along into melting them for good measure.

Poppy looked down at her Pip-boy. The glare from the sun was making it hard to see the screen, even when she upped the brightness considerably, but she angled it away from the light and focused on the screen. She had notes she'd made about her upcoming journey to the Glowing Sea. The resources she'd scrounged were almost enough, and the journey loomed ever closer.

She decided, in the end, that she'd have to drop by Diamond City at least once, anyway. She couldn't let herself be distracted by any loose ends. She'd see Nick there, and Piper, and the Bobrovs, and anyone else who might miss her while she was gone.

Who she would not expect to see again, was Codsworth.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_Monday came too soon, and not soon enough. Poppy felt agitated each time she glimpsed the ration card, and she'd placed it on her desk, where she'd see it often._

_On Sunday night, the weather had taken a turn, and the heat's back broke on a violent summer storm. It poured and thundered for hours, and on Monday morning, when the sun rose, the air was crisp and cool._

_Dad disappeared for work, out of the house before it was even 6 AM, and Poppy, after waking up, had tiptoed into his bedroom. Mom's vanity was still there, untouched, like a shrine. Her make-up was strewn just as she'd left it the last time she'd had energy to do her face._

_Poppy recalled the lessons she'd received from her mother, half-joking most of the time, since Poppy had been too young to be allowed to wear make-up. She recalled the last one, after Mom had received her diagnosis, but before Poppy had learned about it as well, and Mom's strange sobriety as she explained. It's important for you to know, in case I can't show you when you're old enough, Mother had said, and that had seemed like a very odd remark to Poppy at the time._

_But Poppy had forgotten the exchange after it happened, and only now remembered._

_She rubbed a finger against the dark brown eyeshadow her mother had once used, and then rubbed the finger under her eyes, making the dark circles more pronounced. Don't use that one, you'll look too old, her mother had said once, and now Poppy could see she was correct, as she stared into the mirror. She looked much older._

_In the back of mother's closet she found the dresses, untouched. The ones her father was keeping for Poppy, for when she'd grow older. Poppy picked the drabbest one, a matronly yellow dress that no teenager would be caught dead in. Sometime between her mother's death and now, Poppy had grown into her mother's dress size._

_She stood in front of the full length mirror in her parents' bedroom, looking at herself. She pulled her shoulders back, then slumped them down, replicating the tired slope of her father's posture when he came home at the end of a long day of work. She'd seen the people who stood in line for rations, and they looked just like that. Queuing for the scraps of a dying world, as each day brought them closer the end._

_There were days when Poppy wished the world would hurry up and end already. What was there to live for anymore?_

_Later, as she stood in line, a boy would catch her eye: threadbare suit and a battered fedora in hand, like an office worker fallen on hard times. She recognized him immediately, because he was Nate who sat in front of her in History class, and he was certainly not old enough to pick up rations either._

_They smiled at each other, as they simultaneously realized they were running the same scam; and the world continued to not end for a few years longer._


	10. Chapter 10

It was habit for Nick, trying to sniff out the nature of Poppy's extracurriculars. Maybe it wasn't so much a useful habit nowadays, given the world was in a battered enough state that Poppy could hardly make it worse. But it was how he clued into her activities, and how Deacon fit into them.

Nick amended his file on the Railroad to include Poppy's involvement now. Wasn't sure if he should be finding it suspicious, though he put his money on no. The Institute had nabbed her baby, so this made her natural allies with the Institute's most active enemies. But, if that meant she did a bit of good along the way, Nick could hardly complain.

Well, actually... maybe he could complain a little bit, when Deacon was hanging around his office like an eel on vacation, trying to pump Nick for information on Poppy while pretending that wasn't what he was doing. It was nice to see Poppy confound someone else for a change, but Nick didn't need the company right at that moment.

"So, Nick ol' buddy," Deacon said with a shit-eating grin, as he perched on a desk and swung his legs, "you gonna be heading out with the radiant Mrs. Whittaker on her beach holiday?"

'Beach holiday' was, apparently, how Deacon chose to describe her upcoming expedition into the Glowing Sea.

"Why, _you_ angling for the spot?" Nick asked, not lifting his gaze from a file.

"Oh, I'm more of a ski resort type, myself," Deacon said, self-effacing as he put a hand to his chest, "but, uh, you look like you might use the quality time together."

This time Nick did look up, right into Deacon's unflappable smiling expression.

"Don't know if she was planning on taking anyone along," Nick said carefully.

"I'm guessing you're not the beach type either," Deacon said. "City boy, huh? That's fine. Take her out for a stroll, maybe. Blow off some steam before her head pops right off from the pressure." He made an expansive gesture mimicking a cork popping off and liquid frothing out of a bottle. Nick considered Deacon would do well in community theater, if that still existed.

"Take it she's a little tense?" Nick asked, closing his file as he considered.

"Tense, yeah, little bit, little tiny bit, yeah," Deacon said, pulling a face.

Nick frowned, ever so slightly, wondering at Deacon's reaction. Had Poppy... done something? Said something? Nick's thoughts drifted to Fort Hagen, unbidden. To that rage in her eyes when she'd reached a dead end and realized Kellogg would not lead her to her son. Had she revealed some of that to Deacon at some point? Had she tried not to, but Deacon caught on to it anyway?

"All I'm saying is... distraction." Deacon shrugged, his palms up helplessly. "She needs one, stat."

"Alright, then," Nick said after a long pause, his hand slipping to the holotape in his pocket. "I guess we all could use one."

 

* * *

 

In the months since Poppy acquired Home Plate, a set of power armor took permanent residence by the door, like a modern Wasteland gargoyle warding off evil. If this were outside Diamond City's walls, someone would have made off with the armor some time ago, but people in Diamond City liked to consider themselves too respectable for those kinds of hijinks, and for Poppy's part, Home Plate was her latest grab at social respectability, so she didn't make a habit of stomping around in armor inside the walls.

Nick made his way through the bustle of the market, and emerged on the other side to the sight of Poppy tinkering with the armor. She had a shoulder plate in her hands, peering along its inside, fingers tracing along smooth grooves. Red headscarf holding her hair back, matching red lipstick, matching red nails--only slightly chipped. Her eyes stayed on her work even as Nick stepped alongside her.

"Codsworth's inside," she said, "on a domestic rampage. Thought I'd get out of his way while he vacuumed."

"He found a working vacuum?"

"He has one installed," Poppy replied, amused. "Now that I've cleaned out his dust bag, he's like a dog with a bone."

Nick laughed, mostly because he hadn't thought until now to picture Poppy doing something so mundane as housework. Before, his musings on her activities when she was not around were limiting to imagining what sinister acts she was in the middle of committing. 

Now, if he had to consider the image of her as a regular housewife, in a house gown and her hair done up in rollers, he couldn't quite get that image to fit. Poppy'd always seemed a bit too put together for that. Maybe she used to vacuum like the ladies in the magazine ads, in a nice dress and her best pearl necklace.

Nick set those mental images aside, and cleared his throat.

"Speaking of dogs and bones," he said, "I don't suppose you remember our old pal Eddie Winter?"

Sure as the turning seasons, the mention of Winter turned Poppy's disposition downright frosty.

"I dealt strictly with middle management," Poppy replied, smiling coolly, "though I did receive one of his notorious holotapes once." Then, her expression turning especially dour, she added, "Just once."

Nick didn't know what hornet's nest he'd just kicked over, but he couldn't turn back now, after he'd just got the nerve to bring it up. Poppy seemed to shake it off, regardless, and with a twist of a bitter smile, turned to regard him.

"That's right... he's your Kellogg, isn't he?" she asked.

Nick felt it like a punch to the gut. She probably didn't mean it to hurt, but it did. It wasn't something he could help. 

So... Poppy knew about Jenny. Even after she'd slipped off Nick's radar, he didn't slip off hers.

"Maybe old Nick's Kellogg, if you wanna put it like that," he said, shifting his weight. "But I figure you got no special love for him, and he's still around and kicking, when it comes down to it."

"Is he?" Poppy seemed genuinely surprised.

"Figured the rumor would reach you. Before the end, I mean."

Poppy shrugged, and began reattaching the shoulder plate to the armor, evading Nick's gaze.

"The nature of mine and Nate's retirement necessitated a... clean break. I didn't keep in touch with old colleagues, and that was a deliberate choice."

Nick hummed thoughtfully, and wondered if the clean nature of that break was also what necessitated the cache of weapons he found under the floorboards at her old house at Sanctuary Hills.

He hadn't gone there specifically to look for that kind of thing. After seeing the nursery with his own two eyes, the Whittakers' life before the War seemed a more tangible reality for him. But all those old copper instincts of his just couldn't leave well enough alone. And all the Whittakers' old instincts apparently couldn't either. Maybe it was inertia. Maybe it was paranoia. Maybe it was simply what Nate and Poppy had grown up with, and they could fold it closed and build their new life on top of of the old one, but they couldn't completely let go of everything that made them who they were.

If there was any proof Poppy'd gotten out, it was probably because she never went back to Sanctuary Hills. It was because she went out to find her baby instead, and never turned back to get her guns.

She'd always been a dab hand with a crowbar, anyway. Maybe she just hadn't needed them.

"You're right though," Poppy said at length. "I have no love for Winter. So are we doing this?"

"Doing...?"

"Going after him," Poppy said, meeting Nick's eyes once more. "You owe him a bullet, don't you?"

"I don't owe him anything," Nick said. "Winter owes a lot to justice, though."

"Fine," Poppy said. "Justice." She worked the screws on the power armor with quick, jagged movements. "I honestly did like Jenny, you know," she added quietly.

Nick couldn't see any reason she'd lie, so he grunted in acknowledgment. Would that Poppy had turned out a different woman, he mused. Jenny had honestly liked her too.


	11. Chapter 11

Poppy proved chattier than usual. Even though this was a trip down Nick's memory lane, he learned soon enough that Poppy was walking right alongside him. The meandering tour of Boston's police stations seemed to put Poppy in a melancholy mood, and she found some amusement in recounting things she'd always refused to admit to in the interrogation room. Confirming the activities of her old mob buddies, reminding Nick of times he'd been close to catching one or another, an entire slew of tidbits she'd had access to as defense lawyer.

Figured she'd be so forthcoming now, when it didn't matter.

But Nick knew this was all distraction. Deacon had been right, she sorely needed one, though he didn't figure out from what until she admitted it. Instead of having to own up to that, though, she seemed to prefer offering Nick a distraction instead, from the upcoming confrontation. His own personal Kellogg, she'd said, and damn if he hadn't been turning that nugget around in his positronic brain ever since she spat it out.

They were under a cafe awning, waiting out the rain as they smoked, when Poppy shifted from a story about the bad habits of an old associate who apparently made a lousy lookout, to a sudden foray into recent events.

"I have everything I need for my trip," she said. "Have had since I returned to Diamond City."

"Surprised you agreed to this errand, then," Nick said. "Would have expected you to storm off right away."

Poppy shrugged, inhaled daintily from her cigarette, let the smoke languidly escape her red lips.

"So something's eating you," Nick prompted.

"I just... can't take another dead end, Nick." That's what she called him. Not 'Detective', but his name. Was it a slip? Before, he would have thought manipulation.

Maybe a distraction wasn't what she needed, then. This was just delaying the inevitable. She'd have to go eventually, and she'd have to find out one way or the other. And instead she was putting it off to go haring off across the Commonwealth, chasing the voice recordings of the proverbial bigger fish in Poppy's former pond.

"You put it off for enough time... trails can go cold," he said carefully.

There was no flinch on Poppy's part. No acknowledgment of what he'd said. A slow inhale, a curl of smoke, an unfocused stare into the middle distance. Denial was a hell of a sedative.

"How 'bout after we finish up my unfinished business, we go after yours?" he asked. "Together?"

Poppy didn't show surprise in her face, but Nick thought he could see it anyway. The way she shifted in place, posture changing from teenage punk in repose to bored socialite--from Poppy's version of relaxed to her version of... He didn't know. This was always how she'd hidden her feelings, though, now that he thought about it. This was the mask.

"Why, Detective, didn't know you cared," Poppy purred, all kittenish smiles and fluttering eyelashes.

Trick didn't work as well once you knew she was a real person underneath it all. It was like an optical illusion; Nick wondered when he'd managed to see the image shift.

 

* * *

 

There was nothing so satisfying to Nick's ear as the sound of Eddie Winter's reinforced door popping open, and the confused exclamation from inside the room.

"...The fuck?"

Eddie Winter stalked towards the door, ruined face looking worse for the scowl that twisted his features.

"Who the fuck are you?" Winter spat, as Poppy slipped into the room.

"Why, Mr. Winter," Poppy declared in her husky voice, "and here I thought I was more memorable than that! Remember me? Poor ol' Poppy Whittaker?"

Eddie Winter's entire demeanor changed, first taken aback, then dropping his shoulders to play at seeming relaxed.

"Well, I'll be. I definitely remember the name, sweetheart," he declared, showing his yellowed teeth in something too vicious to be a smile. "Defended old Fingers in his little tiff with the state."

"Got him off with time served," Poppy agreed with a careless shrug.

"Yeah, you were a real smooth operator back in the day, from what I heard," Winter said, scratching his chin as he looked her up and down. He didn't fail to notice Nick, but he didn't precisely take a closer look either. Probably didn't give him much thought, as taken as he was with the mystery of Poppy's appearance. "Speaking of smooth," Winter continued, reaching behind his back to take a 10mm out of his waistband. "Maybe you'd like to share how the fuck you got a better deal than I did?"

He didn't aim the gun at Poppy yet, keeping the muzzle aimed to the ceiling, but it was still there, a warning and a reminder both. Two hundred years was enough to make a lot of ghouls go feral, but Winter had been a rabid animal to begin with.

Poppy seemed unconcerned, keeping her own shotgun aimed to the floor.

"Exercise, healthy eating... cryogenics. The usual," she replied, with a careless one-shouldered shrug.

Eddie Winter let out a bark of laughter.

"Oh, I see they preserved your smart-ass mouth, too," he said. "Not that I don't appreciate the good work. I'm more into blondes, myself, but can't complain about the first person walking in here in two hundred years if she's got a figure like this."

"Down, boy," Poppy replied, with more irreverence than she perhaps would have dared to employ back in the day. "We're here on business."

"'We'?" Winter turned to get a proper look at Nick for the first time, and Nick stepped forward to make it easier for him. "You got yourself a robot butler or something, sweetheart?"

"Yes, but I left him at home," Poppy shot back. "No, no, Nick here is more of a... mutual friend."

At the mention of the name, Eddie Winter turned to look into Nick's face, his beady eyes carefully assessing.

"Long time no see, Eddie," Nick touched the brim of his hat, managing to make the gesture as sarcastic as possible.

"Nick? Nick Valentine?" Winter blurted out, proving his memory apparently survives the two centuries intact. His face twisted to mocking. "Like that cop who didn't know how to heel?"

"The very same," Nick replied.

Winter let out a laugh that would have turned Nick's stomach if he had one. The old mobster didn't even notice, turning to Poppy instead.

"You got that guy uploaded to a toaster?" Winter asked. "Boy, you were always a twisted one, weren't you?"

"Oh, you can only wish it was that simple," Poppy said, her voice so low and full of dark promise, that Winter sobered suddenly, sensing danger.

He turned to Nick again.

"You killed Jenny," Nick said, the words feeling surreal coming out of his mouth. "My fiancee. Jennifer Lands. You shot her, not far from here. You remember?"

"I remember she wasn't _your_ fiancee, scrapface," Winter retorted, his eyes flicking back to Poppy momentarily, before turning back to Nick. "And you're no Nick Valentine. And if he didn't want that girl to die? Well, maybe he should've backed off when he had the chance."

Winter turned to Poppy, smiling like he was sharing a joke.

"You know how it goes in this business, don't you, darlin'?" Winter asked.

Nick couldn't tell who raised their gun first, whether it was him or Poppy. He knew that Winter was the one who reacted quicker than both of them, and in the next moment, the bullets started flying.

For an old ghoul, Winter was surprisingly spry. He died like any man, all the same.

 

* * *

Nick knelt down over the cracked concrete. The day was sunny, bright, unforgivingly cheerful. It was the same mild weather as when Jenny was shot. And this was the spot where it happened. 

Was this what closure felt like?

"This is it," he said, looking from the concrete out onto the water. "In this spot, two hundred years ago, two of Eddie's boys put a bullet in Jenny Lands' back."

A hubflower bush grew at the edge of the concrete, where it gave way to earth; a delicate memorial that Jenny would have appreciated.

"Now Eddie's as dead as Jenny and Nick. And I... I'm at a loss."

"You burying Nick today, too?" Poppy asked, voice hushed.

Nick rose to his feet, not sure if he was surprised by the question, or by how close to home it came.

Poppy looked washed out under the sunlight. In Nick's old memories, she was always a creature of high contrasts: primary colors and clean whites. Dark complexion, and bright accessories. Always that red... 

Now she was standing before him in worse for wear brown, and worn out denim--the plumage of the Wasteland--and she seemed more human for it. She seemed more real. He was seeing her with his own eyes for once, not the borrowed sight of a dead man. Why should he go back to that, anyway? Just as well to pretend the world wasn't a blasted husk. He'd heard it called 'Old World blues', once. This obsession with the past that steadily turned to disease of the mind. A type of selective blindness.

"What we did today," Nick said slowly, considering, "I couldn't have done that without you. And old Nick, he never would have agreed to do it with you. So... yeah. I guess in a way, we were always headed for this. Killing Winter, getting justice for Jenny? That's ours, and has nothing to do with who we were."

Poppy gave a slow smile at that, the soft expression unfurling slowly across her face like a stop-motion capture of an opening blossom. He'd never noticed it like that before, and strangely enough, it made Nick feel somewhat embarrassed for noticing it now. Like he had no right to it.

"Funny, you sound like you just freed yourself from half a ton of unwanted baggage, right then," Poppy said.

"Maybe I did," Nick said, his voice faint with surprise. "Maybe Nick isn't something I have to carry like a burden anymore."

Maybe he hadn't killed Winter for anything Winter had done to Nick, or to Jenny. Maybe he'd done it because the person he was now, the synth living on borrowed memories, was someone who couldn't abide a brute like Winter cheating death, and had to take matters in his own hands. The Justice of the Wasteland, not of some dead country that bargained with criminals.

And in this new world, he couldn't ignore that Poppy had been right alongside him, delivering the final bullet through Eddie Winter's skull.

Somehow, Nick had awakened from his Old World blues, and into a present that he didn't... quite... dislike.


	12. Chapter 12

Nick nearly staggered on his feet, stunned and dismayed in equal proportion, but rapidly slipping into incredulous as he refused to believe his ears.

"You're going alone?" he repeated, looking at Poppy for any sign this was a joke.

"Well, I'll have this tin can along," she said, tapping the power armor. It gave dull clangs at the rap of her knuckles.

"Power armor can't watch your back," Nick pointed out.

"You don't know what mods I have installed," she said, laughing. She was making much too light of the entire thing, and Nick couldn't fully figure out why.

If he had to admit it to himself--and he really didn't want to--he was a bit hurt she wouldn't want him along on her trip into the Glowing Sea, after she had so thoroughly helped him dispose of Eddie Winter.

Instead she'd come back from Andrews Station and begun packing right away. An overstuffed backpack was reclined by the door, as Poppy went around Home Plate calmly unplugging everything like she'd be going on a long vacation, and not a dangerous trip into horrifically radioactive and hostile landscape.

"It doesn't have to be me, Doll," Nick said, as a desperate last ploy. "Hancock might be itching for another walkabout. Heck, Codsworth probably can't wait to haul your luggage, either."

"Oh, I very much would, mum!" Codsworth confirmed.

"Codsworth's going to Greygarden," Poppy said decisively.

"Deacon in a protection suit?" Nick suggested with increasing desperation.

"He'd get it punctured within five minutes because he stopped to quip witticisms at a radscorpion," Poppy dismissed out of hand, and Nick couldn't precisely counter that. Poppy actually liked Deacon more than Nick did, but she was not unaware of his more grating traits. Nick suspected she even liked Deacon for his more grating traits.

"Nick," she said, stepping right in front of him, close enough that Nick could imagine he felt the pull of her gravity. "Stop mother-henning."

"I'm not--" He made a frustrated sound. "I'm the one being reasonable here. You're doing all this a lot riskier than you have to."

"I'm doing this exactly as risky as I have to," she said, "because the only one at risk will be myself. You forget that if I take someone else along, I'd have to watch their back as well."

"Don't make it sound like some kinda humanitarian gesture. You don't want anyone to see what you'll do if you don't get your way."

Even as he said the words, Nick winced. It was harsh, unfair. She'd be justified in slapping his block off for talking to her like that, even if it was true. Instead she just looked at him, with an unblinking reptilian stare that Nick usually got from criminals who refused to crack in the interrogation room.

"Sorry," he muttered, shoving her hands in his pockets like an admonished child. "That was... over the line."

"Your concern is appreciated," Poppy said, "but bottle that up to use on people who need it more."

Then, before Nick could respond, she closed the distance between them, and kissed his cheek. He felt the pressure, his confused sensors registering the feeling of her breath across his artificial skin, but not the warmth of her body, and he blinked. That was all he did, simply stared at Poppy and blinked.

She seemed amused with his reaction, and reached over to wipe her thumb across his cheek, right over the place she'd kissed--wiping away lipstick he realized. Right. He probably didn't want to hear the speculation if he walked out of her home and all the way to his office with her lipstick mark on his face. He could only imagine the gossip.

"Be back before you know it," she said, hefting the backpack onto her shoulder.

 

* * *

 

And that was it. She picked up her bag, got into her suit of power armor, and left Diamond City with minimal goodbyes. She didn't act like this was any different than her usual trips across the Wasteland, and maybe to her nerves, it wasn't. To Nick's nerves, however...

A few days passed, then a week. Then two weeks. Nick spent a lot of his idle time thinking about where she was or how far she'd gotten, though he was at least smart enough to realize that he'd started worrying about her before she even reached the edge of the Glowing Sea. He found cases to distract him, new people to help. That worked to a point, but when a man didn't sleep, he found himself with more time to worry than was strictly ideal.

He poured that worry into other pursuits, just as she'd inadvertently advised. A missing persons case took him from Diamond City all the way down to the Boston shore, where he was reminded of Deacon talking about taking Poppy on a beach holiday, and from there to Goodneighbor, where Hancock cheerfully asked after Poppy. And just like that, all that careful not thinking about it went to waste as he started to worry again.

It was the worst parts of obsession. Before, when he had the excuse of professional interest as a veneer, he'd at least been overthinking the Whittakers' criminal activities. Now he was just pathetically, personally compromised, to no end except making the wait more miserable.

"Stop mother-henning," he muttered to himself when the vague, shapeless worry came over him again. He followed this advice only about half the time, though, and the rest of the time he sublimated those feelings into a drive to solve more cases. Funny how just then, there seemed to be a lot fewer people getting into trouble than he would have liked. Got so desperate, he accepted some cockamamie case to find a client's lost teddy bear.

Around him, Poppy's absence seemed not to register as any more unusual than her previous ones. Maybe it wasn't; maybe he was just making a mountain out of a molehill. But it felt strange how everyone else seemed to be carrying on with their routines and no worry about Poppy's return. He wished he could take it just as much as a given, then wondered why he didn't.

She'd been through some tough scraps. It seemed strange that he was this worried about her this time.

He was still pondering on the issue when he went to the Dugout Inn one afternoon, on a business call. Vadim Bobrov was in the midst of an annoyed exchange with his brother, but upon spotting Nick, he cut off suddenly and smiled beatifically, waving off Yefim like a mosquito.

"Ah, Nick! Just in time!" Vadim declared, taking out a bottle and two shot glasses.

"I'll take your word for it, but I still don't drink," Nick said, leery of getting drawn into another trademark Bobrov Brothers scheme.

"No, no, second glass is for me," Vadim assured.

Yefim had already melted away into the back room, so this really only brought up a different question.

"Who's the first glass for, then?" he asked.

"Me." Sliding past Nick and up to the counter, Poppy picked up one of the glasses and drained it in the same motion, wincing a bit. "New batch, Vadim?"

"Made for you special," Vadim winked.

Poppy grinned and turned around, then chuckled, raising a hand to Nick's chin and clicking his slack jaw closed.

"Catching flies, Detective?" she purred.

 

* * *

Nick recovered from Poppy's sudden return just enough to let himself get dragged off to one of the Dugout Inn's battered couches. Poppy poured herself another drink as he sat and watched, still stunned. He flattened his hands against his legs, the way he used to when he was alive and got sweaty palms whenever he was nervous. There wasn't much point to it now, except habit. Gave his hands something to do.

"Didn't know you were in town," he said, with a forced lightness he didn't really feel. He got a sense like he'd left off with her on a bad conversational note last time, and now he was afraid chit-chat might not be the best way to put their relationship back on the rails.

"Came in early morning," she said. "And I spent most of the day sleeping."

"Didn't see your armor when I passed Home Plate," Nick said.

"I hauled it inside when I came," she said. "Bits were falling off."

"Ah."

There was a lull in the conversation, which Poppy didn't bother to fill.

"So... not a dead end, then?" Nick said tentatively.

A smile oozed across Poppy's face as she sipped her drink--whiskey this time, a gift from Vadim in exchange for teaching him the phrase 'palate cleanser'.

"Not a dead end," she agreed.

"You... got a plan?" he continued.

"Oh, yes," she said. Her eyelashes were lowered demurely, as she looked down at her glass, slowly turning it to swirl her drink. "There's a plan. Don't worry, there's a plan."

She dragged her gaze up towards him slowly, head tilted, smile lopsided in a way he'd only seen in her most sarcastic moods. But then it faded, that glimpse of viciousness, like an ember smothering on its own. She looked at him with something akin softness, instead. Funny, but even though he couldn't recall when she'd ever looked at him like that, the expression also didn't look unfamiliar on her face.

"It's good to be back, at least," she said, continuing to swirl her drink.

"Yeah," Nick said, voice faint. He could sit there all night and just look at her until he really believed she was back, and for a while, that was exactly what he did.

**Author's Note:**

> Enjoyed this story? Consider [buying me a coffee](https://ko-fi.com/A86637AZ).


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